- Apr
- 14
- 2008
Persistent storage coming to Amazon EC2
By: Robert Dempsey | Tags:The Amazon Web Services team announced yesterday a much anticipated feature for Amazon EC2 - persistent storage. This feature is not yet available, but coming soon. Per the Amazon Web Service Blog,
“…our forthcoming persistent storage feature will give you the ability to create reliable, persistent storage volumes for use with EC2. Once created, these volumes will be part of your account and will have a lifetime independent of any particular EC2 instance.”
The new persistent storage feature will allow for unformatted disk volumes ranging from 1 GB to 1 TB, with the ability to attach one or more to a single EC2 instance. If that wasn’t enough, you will also be able to make snapshot backups of the volumes and store them on S3. All volumes will be accessible via an API and the EC2 command-line tools: CreateVolume, DeleteVolume, AttachVolume, and CreateSnapshot.
What is very cool about this new feature is that the volumes are independent of EC2 instances. Did your EC2 instance just vaporize? No problem. Fire up a new one and attached the volume.
Atlantic Dominion Solutions partner RightScale is ready to roll with support for the new volumes. I talked with Thorsten who told me,
“We already have quite extensive support in our internal systems (for persistent storage). We have the Ruby gem (right_aws) already done, so we can release that as soon as Amazon goes public with the details. But the heavy lifting comes with the volumes and the snapshots, supporting multiple database use cases. To be effective, you need to automate the whole snapshot schedule stuff, else you drown and you have no clue where the best copy of your data is.”
Amazon continues to up the ante with the upcoming persistent storage feature. With Google AppEngine now in the mix as a competitor, we look for even more innovation to come from the Amazon Web Services team.
Share this post
Related Posts
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
