Amazon's pricing model is even more busted when you look at the cost of puts for small objects. The simplest answer is for Amazon to revisit their pricing based

Amazon's pricing model is even more busted when you look at the cost of puts for small objects. The simplest answer is for Amazon to revisit their pricing based on their actual costs. You can use SimpleDB to index larger objects stored in S3 and save money. I've written up a description of how I did this, but it proved too much hassle and we've moved on to HBase. http://kdpeterson.net/blog/2009/06/pack-multiple-small-objects-in-s3-for-cost-savings.html http://kdpeterson.net/blog/2009/06/pack-multiple-small-objec... I'm skeptical of any business model too close to Amazon's core services. I'm thinking of things like Elastic MapReduce, which aren't perfect, aren't optimal compared to what you could do yourself, but aren't bad enough that I would ever choose a niche provider instead of EMR or running my own cluster.