Amazon recently announced their latest web service, SimpleDB, to a roar of buzz and hype. I finally got a chance to sit down and read through the docs and blog posts, and like with the Facebook Data Store API, I've written up my thoughts.

The executive summary is: I like it. It's solid, straightforward, and eminently useful. Sure, it's limited. It includes design decisions that clearly simplified the implementation at the cost of functionality and usability. Still, as a result of those decisions, SimpleDB has the potential to be very robust, scalable, and performant.

With SimpleDB alongside S3 and EC2, Amazon's web services look more and more like the Unix philosophy: small, simple tools that do one job, do it well, and fit together in ways that complement each other. Very, very cool.

Then again, I'm a sucker for anything based on tuplespaces...

Read more...