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A) I don't get it - Is it a proprietary database maintained and provided only by Amazon? If that's the case, then isn't that a terrible trade-off for a business

by neya 14y ago

A) I don't get it - Is it a proprietary database maintained and provided only by Amazon? If that's the case, then isn't that a terrible trade-off for a business to get locked into a proprietary database on a proprietary platform? I agree it could save you a LOT of cash, but, assume you ran Mongo or PostgreSQL, then if you aren't satisfied with provider A, you can dump them and migrate your data to provider B, let alone all the modifications you can make on top of these Open source databases...Sure, you may face downtime, but that's not as bad as being locked into a proprietary database that you have no control over. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong.. B) How does this compare to LinkedIn's Voldemort (which seems to be inspired from Amazon's Dynamo[1])? Voldemort has a lot of positive feedback from real world applications running at Scale, I guess. [1]http://blog.linkedin.com/2009/03/20/project-voldemort-scaling-simple-storage-at-linkedin/ http://blog.linkedin.com/2009/03/20/project-voldemort-scalin...

mark_l_watson 14y ago
In general, I agree with you. However, AWS services are different in the sense that Amazon has become like a large utility company and betting your business on the long term availability of these services seems like a safe bet. Just renting EC2s like expensive VPSs does not make much sense, but using DynamoDB, SimpleDB, Elastic MapReduce, etc. as appropriate and in effect composing systems from your own and Amazon's services seems like the modern way to do things.
julien_c 14y ago
It's a key-value store, so you don't really get locked in. Also, Cassandra is supposed to be pretty close if you ever want to run your own database cloud.
- bermanoid 14y ago
  Further, Amazon provides a ton of sample code showing how their various services can be used to easily export data from DynamoDB, so there's very little friction there apart from paying for an EMR cluster of whatever size you prefer and waiting for the job to finish
lubos 14y ago
DynamoDB is very constrained when it comes to features which means 100% compatible alternative can be easily developed on top of other database. So the lock-in is not really a problem.
outside1234 14y ago
The reality is that, if you have enough data to warrant using DynamoDB, you're going to be locked in more by the "weight" of that data. Getting your data out of DynamoDB is going to be so expensive that it is the driving factor, not refactoring your code to use another DB.
jbellis 14y ago
It's a lot more similar to Cassandra than Voldemort, actually. Voldemort is more of a straight-up clone of the original Dynamo, while Cassandra and DynamoDB are second-generation, what-can-we-learn-from-Dynamo's-weak-points evolutions from there. http://www.datastax.com/dev/blog/amazon-dynamodb http://www.datastax.com/dev/blog/amazon-dynamodb
- neya 14y ago
  Thank you :)

by neya 14y ago

mark_l_watson 14y ago

In general, I agree with you. However, AWS services are different in the sense that Amazon has become like a large utility company and betting your business on the long term availability of these services seems like a safe bet. Just renting EC2s like expensive VPSs does not make much sense, but using DynamoDB, SimpleDB, Elastic MapReduce, etc. as appropriate and in effect composing systems from your own and Amazon's services seems like the modern way to do things.

julien_c 14y ago

It's a key-value store, so you don't really get locked in. Also, Cassandra is supposed to be pretty close if you ever want to run your own database cloud.

bermanoid 14y ago
Further, Amazon provides a ton of sample code showing how their various services can be used to easily export data from DynamoDB, so there's very little friction there apart from paying for an EMR cluster of whatever size you prefer and waiting for the job to finish

lubos 14y ago

DynamoDB is very constrained when it comes to features which means 100% compatible alternative can be easily developed on top of other database. So the lock-in is not really a problem.

outside1234 14y ago

The reality is that, if you have enough data to warrant using DynamoDB, you're going to be locked in more by the "weight" of that data. Getting your data out of DynamoDB is going to be so expensive that it is the driving factor, not refactoring your code to use another DB.

jbellis 14y ago

It's a lot more similar to Cassandra than Voldemort, actually. Voldemort is more of a straight-up clone of the original Dynamo, while Cassandra and DynamoDB are second-generation, what-can-we-learn-from-Dynamo's-weak-points evolutions from there. http://www.datastax.com/dev/blog/amazon-dynamodb http://www.datastax.com/dev/blog/amazon-dynamodb

neya 14y ago
Thank you :)