April 14, 2008
EC2 to gain persistent storage. From the Amazon Web Services Blog:
In the same way that your running EC2 instances, your Elastic IP addresses, your S3 buckets and your SQS queues can be thought of as items contained within the scope of your AWS account, our forthcoming persistent storage feature will give you the ability to create reliable, persistent storage volumes for use with EC2. Once created, these volumes will be part of your account and will have a lifetime independent of any particular EC2 instance.
These volumes can be thought of as raw, unformatted disk drives which can be formatted and then used as desired (or even used as raw storage if you’d like). Volumes can range in size from 1 GB on up to 1 TB; you can create and attach several of them to each EC2 instance. They are designed for low latency, high throughput access from Amazon EC2. Needless to say, you can use these volumes to host a relational database.
You will also be able to perform “snapshot” backups of your volumes to Amazon S3. You can use these snapshots to create new volumes or to roll back your stored data to an earlier point in time.
The volumes are accessible via a new set of APIs, with functions like CreateVolume, DeleteVolume, AttachVolume, and CreateSnapshot. The same functionality is also available via the EC2 Command-Line tools.
Amazon is doing a fantastic job at tearing down barriers to entry for scalable web apps.