Thursday, August 21, 2008

Amazon Adds Persistent Storage Service

Seattle-based Amazon Web Services, the arm of Amazon.com focused on providing Internet web services to third party web sites and services, said today that the firm has launched a new service called Amazon Elastic Block Store, or Amazon EBS. According to Amazon, the new EBS service provides persistent storage for the firm's Amazon EC2 compute services offering. Prior to the new Amazon EBS service, data tied to Amazon EC2 servers was lost when those servers were terminated, which made it more difficult for software developers to use EC2 for their applications. Amazon said the new service provides persistent storage, backup capability, and ability to store snapshots of data to the firm's Amazon S3 storage service. Software developers using Amazon EC2 have had to develop software applications which did not store data on compute instances; the new persistent storage ability makes it easier for them to use EC2 servers for databases or file systems. Pricing of the new EBS service was not released.