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Infrastructure Q1: Cloud and big data woo enterprises

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 06:55:04 +0000

With enterprises now open to hybrid clouds, Amazon Web Services finally relaxed its rigid public-cloud-only stance and launched services to support hybrid-cloud deployments in the first quarter of 2012. On the big data front, the Hadoop players realized very few companies have teams of systems engineers to learn MapReduce. This has meant adding support for SQL and integrating Hadoop with existing data-management tools and systems. In other words, Hadoop has grown up and is now being taken seriously by companies like Oracle and Microsoft. This quarterly report examines these trends as well the exciting M&A and IPO news in this arena. It also includes a near-term outlook for the next 12–18 months.

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Amazon’s DynamoDB: rattling the cloud market

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 17:33:13 +0000

The latest AWS offering to rock the technology establishment is DynamoDB, a NoSQL database service that puts the power of NoSQL in the hands of every developer. This research note analyzes the multiple ways in which Amazon’s announcement has disrupted the big data and cloud computing market and what that means for other companies and offerings in the space — from the startups selling Hadoop distributions to public cloud providers like Rackspace and Microsoft, which will have to scramble to keep up and differentiate. Additional companies mentioned in this report include Cloudant, Heroku and VMware. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial.

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Amazon SimpleDB 101 & Why It Matters

Nitin Borwankar — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 20:22:19 +0000

Amazon continues to amaze us with its Amazon Web Services series of offerings. The latest is SimpleDB, which will be available in limited beta in a few weeks. And it is bound to have a major impact on web infrastructure. As Amazon says in its email to existing developers:

This service works in close conjunction with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), collectively providing the ability to store, process and query data sets in the cloud.

As we’ve already noted,

…the center of gravity is shifting away from monolithic centralized data management to massively parallel distributed data management.

If you are in the business of managing massive amounts of distributed data, you cannot gloss over the Amazon WS trifecta — data-in-the-cloud is the future and with WS, Amazon is way ahead of the pack.What about the offerings of other vendors? Google, for example, has BigTable, and truth be told, SimpleDB has a distinctly BigTable-ish feel to it. But a side-by-side comparison makes it clear that Amazon WS in general – and SimpleDB in particular — is superior, for the following reasons:

Google’s offerings – not only BigTable but GoogleBase, Gdisk, etc. — all have an ad hoc, grab-bag-of-tools feeling to them, devoid of any integrated strategy. Or if there is one, it is well-hidden.
Amazon WS clearly involves a well-designed master plan aimed at changing the face of software as a service, each new offering akin to a chess piece in a game focused on creating strategic long-term value. And with SimpleDB, the queen has moved to the center.
Amazon WS is based on the YOYODA principle — You Own Your Own Data, Always. Along with Amazon S3, SimpleDB is a sharp arrow in the quiver of open data proponents.
Amazon WS includes a built-in, flexible payment system so users are neither forced to offer their app for free nor have an “ad-supported” model forced upon them. Now you can build a data-based web app on SimpleDB and seamlessly charge for it.

Tersely put, SimpleDB is hugely disruptive. It will take some time to evolve the new thinking patterns and new design disciplines that this technology forces us to consider. To do so, consider this breakdown of the similarities and differences between SimpleDB and conventional relational databases.

Very, very simplistically speaking, domains are like tables, with items like rows and attributes like columns. A query cannot cross domains, so in this analogy you can’t “join” domains. But that sort of thinking is a holdover from the relational database normalized model.In reality a domain is much more like a database, so we have to stop thinking in terms of tables and joins.

Say we had an SQL database, with tables for “Company,” “Departments” and “Employees.” In SimpleDB, the items (rows) for all three could all go in one domain (database), with it you can run queries on this domain and using operators like UNION and INTERSECT, you can do the equivalent of joins.Existing web technologies such as Ruby on Rails, Django and Hibernate all have an Object Relational Mapper (ORM), which maps language objects to relational database tables.

If designers of these ORMs want to stay in the scalable apps game, they should take a serious look at using SimpleDB as a data store. Better yet, they should build ORMs from the ground up to integrate with SimpleDB.More than two years ago I wrote that Web 2.0 needs Data 2.0. The combination of EC2, S3 and SimpleDB is a toolkit for assembling massively scalable REST addressable web databases. Data 2.0 is now officially here. May the fun and games begin.

Nitin Borwankar is a database guru based in San Francisco Bay Area. You can find his writings on hisblog, TagSchema.

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