RSSNote to Zoho
Zoho-ians, do you think it will be possible to use your application environement (writer/creator etc etc) as the front end and use Amazon S3 or similar option as the backend (data repository)?
Your thoughts? Is it technically possible? Do you think there are any merits to the approach?
Prashanth:
We do have plans to provide this option to the user. Its the user’s data and he should be given the option on where to store the data. This certainly makes perfect sense with apps like Writer, Sheet, Show etc. For Creator, it is slightly different.
Technically this is possible and there certainly are merits based on your usage.
Raju
Yes and No.
Yes – zoho can actually have its filestore in Amazon S3. Our data formats follows standards like HTML, open document format (ODF), so its easy for people to take back their documents at any point of time, kind-of escrow for our customers. We can even use S3 as backup option for our customers.
No – for completely replacing zoho’s data store. We have fully-relational database servers at the backend for services like zoho creator and other zoho office services and we are optimizing the databases for better performance backed with distributed grid architecture. So replacing such optimized data store may not be possible with S3. However, we can use S3 as backup option and store the database dump in it.
On a related note, see this story about smugmug
http://blogs.smugmug.com/onethumb/2006/11/10/amazon-s3-show-me-the-money/
Hyther
Hyther & Raju, thank you for the comments, I understand this concept is difficult to implement in creator kind of situation, but in those cases an external data store makes the most sense, As most business users would love to develop/use situated/business Apps on SaaS based platforms, but they & their IT departments are worried about their data, instead if the S3/similar option(for example a grid hosted by the enterprise) was available than it would ease their concerns & improve adoption. They would need to only get the data store platform validated.
Hyther – that was a good post.