Uses for Amazon SimpleDB: authentication Dec18 '07

Immediately after Amazon SimpleDB was announced, I started to conjure up possible uses for the service. Clearly there are limitations on the amount of data you can store, and you don't have anywhere near as many handy functions and capabilities as you do with MySQL, for example.

Still, for a simple application where you'd like to avoid scaling issues, SimpleDB might be the answer. I'm thinking of an application with relatively small amounts of data per entity, such as Twitter, which only stores 140 character strings of text. Obviously you may not be able to store entire 1,000 word blog posts with SimpleDB, but other aspects of your site/application may be an ideal fit.

Amazon even says so themselves:

Amazon SimpleDB is designed to store relatively small amounts of data and is optimized for fast data access and flexibility in how that data is expressed.

In combination with Amazon S3, you could use SimpleDB to store file pointers, while maintaining the actual large files on S3 - completely minimizing your costs to transfer/regulate the application.

In order to minimize your costs across AWS services, large objects or files should be stored in Amazon S3, while the pointers and the meta-data associated with those files can be stored in Amazon SimpleDB. This will allow you to quickly search for and access your files, while minimizing overall storage costs.

Pretty soon all aspects of hosting a web site will be managed and scaled effectively through services such as S3 and SimpleDB.

Why are we paying third-party hosting companies?

Use SimpleDB for authentication

If you're application requires authentication, why not use SimpleDB to store usernames and passwords? Heck, you could even store all user details. This would reduce the load on your own database server, for this frequently accessed portion of your application.

Everyone has to log in, right? How many requests are for users logging in, ie: verifying the password, etc? Probably tons. This is the entrance into your app. Even the API must verify the credentials.

Push this realm onto SimpleDB and only query for the actual content on your own database server.

This is just one example of using SimpleDB.

Categories: Amazon , Databases , Ideas , SimpleDB

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matthom is published and produced by Matt Thommes - an independent publishing enthusiast, mobile blogger, content creator, informative writer, web developer from Chicago. Never one to conform, Matt intends to promote the effect the web has on our lives, in an effort to intensify, instruct, and clarify all that is happening around us.

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