Saturday, January 12, 2008

A free implementation of Amazon SimpleDB

Here is a tip to Amazon - there should be a free implementation of SimpleDB. I am now considering using SimpleDB for a web application - but I would like to develop it on my desktop computer - without paying Amazon, without even connecting to Amazon. This might be a minor issue - the fee you would pay for developing the application on Amazon web services seem to be very small. But it would be so much more convenient: no fiddling with credit cards, no problems for developers with shaky internet connection and more compatibility with Free Software/Open Source development models where money is always a difficult subject.

For Amazon it would not mean much less income - since as I've said the fee for the development use of the services is rather small - but it would mean many more customers. Perhaps it would also mean some competition - but this would only validate the whole model and make it more suitable for big business which does not like so much dependence on one provider.

Update: Open Source EC2: EUCALYPTUS.

4 comments:

Composing said...

I wonder what it is about SimpleDB you want?

Is it because you want to prototype develop for SimpleDB or you just particularly like the query language.

(If the former, I'd have thought it's reasonably cheap to use SimpleDB before you have any other users? Or isn't it?)

If the latter, would something like Sqlite or Sleepycat do something similar?

Mind you, I agree, it would be a killer move for Amazon to do this.

zby said...

Hi Phil - answering your question - I would like to prototype for SimpleDB on my desktop. It would be just so much more convenient for me - no fickling with the credit card and I could develop even when my internet goes down. For Amazon it would not make big difference - because as you say the development on Amazon is cheap - so they would not lose big money here.

John Powers said...

Sorry to be off topic, but I saw a post by Dave Winer Block with Timeout for Twitter that reminded me of your quest to find structures to regulate threads.

Anonymous said...

There is a tool that I have used, that does exactly what you have requested.

It is called SimplerDB. It is a fairly decent free implementation of Amazon SimpleDB.

You can find it at http://rubyforge.org/projects/aws-sdb/

Hope this helps, its hard to get into the Amazon SimpleDB beta, so this tool is a great way to kickstart development.