Thursday, December 13, 2007

Amazon SimpleDB Runs on Erlang

I just came across this blog post: http://www.satine.org/archives/2007/12/13/amazon-simpledb/. The author got the scoop that Amazon's just-released SimpleDB runs on Erlang. This is actually the second Amazon Web Service that runs on Erlang -- at least, if the rumors I've heard that Amazon SQS was built with Erlang as well are true (update: I found the reference in this article).

It's pretty cool knowing that you can use the same language that powers some of the massive systems that Amazon and Ericsson have built to whip up a blog app just as easily as in Ruby or Python. (But if you built it in Erlang/ErlyWeb, you could also use Comet to make the blog update itself in real time, resting assured that horizontal scalability is just a matter of reconfiguring your Mnesia schema :) ).

Amazon SimpleDB is a game changer. It fills the last hole in making Amazon Web Services a complete environment for elastic, scalable web application hosting: the need for a fast, reliable data store. Together with S3 and EC2, SimpleDB makes it feasible for small startups to scale like the big companies but without the operational overhead. What a great set of products from Amazon.

7 comments:

Dmitrii 'Mamut' Dimandt said...

Web is getting an interesting place to be. I wonder when Amazon and Google will finally clash :)

eliott said...

[couchDB][1] is also a very interesting project, just so happens it too is written in erlang.

These projects are giving people options for data storage and access. I think it is great!

[1]: http://couchdb.org/CouchDB/CouchDBWeb.nsf/Home?OpenForm

Richard said...

I ready the DOC.... all the DOC and nothing but the DOC.

I think SimpleDB has the potential to be a tipping point. Dare I be blasted for suggesting Web3.0. Well, not exactly... but at least there is a big picture to view.

My only concern is that in the DOC,

o many of the links are broken,
o the API seem to exclude erlang (and python),
o cannot sign up yet,
o the DOCs are vague on many points but enough for a tease.


I'm counting the days until I can implement a POC.

Luke Hoersten said...

A few months ago I was interviewing for Amazon and one of the interviewers confirmed that they do have a few teams that use Erlang. As long as they can expose a service to the other teams, they can use whatever technology they want. From what I understood though, it was one guy that was way into Erlang and when he moved teams, the code went a bit unmanaged.

Think in Read » links for 2007-12-15 said...

[...] Yariv’s Blog » Blog Archive » Amazon SimpleDB Runs on Erlang (tags: Erlang) [...]

Erlang: A New Way to Program That’s 20 Years Old - GigaOM said...

[...] Zelenka, Wednesday, December 19, 2007 at 3:00 PM PT Comments (0) Geeks everywhere got excited recently when they heard that SimpleDB might be based on Erlang. Why? Is Erlang the next [...]

Vidar Hokstad said...

The biggest problem with Amazon web services is price. They're far more expensive than many other hosting services. Of course what you get for that is "unlimited" scalability, but frankly most web apps never need to scale far enough to make it worthwhile, and for those that do you always have the option of using a cheaper hosting alternative for the base load and using Amazon to handle peaks.

There are other issues too, such as lack of transparency in terms of their infrastructure, which matters for larger companies, but I believe they'll address that soon enough. Whether they _can_ address price is another issue, sine even though you can scale, they need to bake the cost of having massive amount of infrastructure on standby to be able to offer it.