RSSYet Another Amazon Web Service
YAAWS… I think it's got a certain ring to it, don't you. At the rate Amazon Web Services are rolling out new products, I feel the need for an acronym to lighten the typing load. It looks as if there are significant synergies to be had in the web services business once you build out the basics: storage, processing, and transfer. In the same way that S3 and EC2 leveraged internal systems the company had to develop to service its own website, Amazon is now leveraging the commercial S3 and EC2 product developments to roll out new services based on those building blocks.
Today it's a beta implementation of the Hadoop distributed processing framework, called Amazon ElasticMapReduce (AEMR?). The application floats on top of EC2 and is aimed at businesses which have massive data processing needs but which do not necessarily want to maintain the internal resources to handle all of that processing. To date, this probably hasn't included too many businesses… most of those which realize they have such needs also have the processing capacity. What this does, however, is open up the potential to make use of such processing to businesses which would not otherwise naturally be able to afford it. It's a new horizon for data processing for smaller businesses. This continue the general trend in computing, which has been to allow smaller and smaller organizations to eventually make use of the same power as their larger competitors.
Forward thinking users who already saw the potential of EC2 to service this sort of large-scale processing had been running Hadoop on privately rented instances already, but the Amazon implementation automates much of the grunt work of getting the framework going. Although the press release is a little muddled, it sounds as if Netflix and eHarmony may be among early customers of the service.
