Amazon.com S3 storage service available today
This morning Amazon opened up S3, its new online storage solution for web applications, and now you can store unlimited amounts of data on Amazon servers for US$.15 per gigabyte, paid monthly. S3 was purportedly built to support …
Context & Ripple Effects
Amazon moved from announcing a grid-storage web service on March 14 to making the service available a day later. S3 gives web-application builders Amazon-hosted storage priced at $0.15 per gigabyte each month, rather than requiring them to provision a fixed amount of storage in advance.
The significance is operational as much as technical: Amazon is offering storage as a metered web service, placing capacity and billing behind an API-facing service for application developers.
First-order effects
- Web-application developers can buy storage from Amazon in usage-based increments, with Amazon operating the underlying servers.
- Amazon gains a direct, recurring infrastructure relationship with developers whose applications need data storage.
Second-order effects
- Application teams can treat storage spending as a monthly variable cost rather than committing upfront to capacity they may not use.
- Amazon’s per-gigabyte model puts pressure on storage providers serving web developers to compete on provisioning flexibility and operating burden, not only hardware capacity.
Third-order effects
- If developers adopt metered storage for production applications, infrastructure purchasing shifts toward remotely operated services and away from developer-managed capacity.
- S3 is an early instance of capacity-aware pricing becoming a product interface: the provider manages the pool while customers consume and pay for units of use.
The trend: Web infrastructure is moving toward metered, provider-operated building blocks that let developers assemble applications without owning the underlying capacity.