Amazon Paper

Amazon is known for online retail. People all over the world can go to Amazon.com and find virtually anything they may be looking for. The economy, however, has taken a toll on many retail businesses, and Amazon is feeling the effects. This decline has Amazon rethinking their business empire.

Amazon is changing their business strategy from being an online retailer to offering computing, storage and other technical services to businesses as well as individuals. I believe that this is a smart move on their part. They will continue to be a major online retailer and offer technical services.

Amazon in 2007 added SimpleDB to its IT infrastructure. (Schonfeld, 2007) Amazon SimpleDB is a web service for running queries on structured data in real time. This service works in close conjunction with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), collectively providing the ability to store, process and query data sets in the cloud. These services are designed to make web-scale computing easier and more cost-effective for developers.

In most cases to achieve functionality like this you are dealing with having a high cost investment for a jam packed relational database that in the end is creating a more complex operation that will probably need a DBA to administer. Without complexity the SimpleDB offers a simple functioning database that gives querying of structured data as well as real lookup time. SimpleDB also provides an API for storage and access. It requires no schema and automatically indexes your data. This removes the task of performance tuning, data modeling and index maintenance by administration.

As for the future, (Schonfeld, 2007) since SimpleDB operates at Web scale, larger companies will wake up to the cost saving opportunities of such a service as well. IBM, for one, is already trying to preempt any customer defections with its copycat Blue Cloud initiative. If speed is of the essence, you might still...