The Software Devotional

Free SimpleDB Pricing and Public Beta

Free SimpleDB Pricing Tier

Though the announcement showed up in my mail today, Amazon announced yesterday that a new free pricing tier will be made available for its SimpleDB service. According to Amazon's SimpleDB page, the first 25 machine hours, 1GB of data transfer, and 1GB of data storage used each month will be free of charge for at least the first 6 months (starting Dec 1, 2008).

From Amazon: You can get started with SimpleDB for free and without risk. For at least the first six months of the public beta (starting December 1, 2008), you pay no charges on the first 25 Machine Hours, 1 GB of Data Transfer, and 1 GB of Storage that you consume every month. In most use cases, approximately 2,000,000 GET, QUERY, or QUERYWITHATTRIBUTES API requests can be completed per month before incurring any usage charges. Many applications should be able to operate perpetually within this free tier, such as a daily web-site analysis and traffic reporting tool, a web indexing service, or an analytics utility for online marketing programs.

I have read elsewhere that this process is being spun as a
'trial' for the SimpleDB product. I don't believe that Amazon views this free tier as a traditional trial period and I don't think they are trying to convince more people to help test their software while it is still in beta. It appears to me that Amazon is putting a toe in the water to determine how successful and how costly a free tier might be for SimpleDB. If Amazon can capture the hearts and minds of budding mISVs (when cost is a paramount concern), then they are likely to subsequently capture the pocketbooks of the successful mISVs as well.

In addition to the new free pricing tier, SimpleDB's monthly storage cost per GB has been reduced from $1.50 to $0.25 - 83%.  No doubt, this can be attributed to Google's and Microsoft's plethora of cloud computing announcements this year. Further, at $1.50, SimpleDB's storage cost was way out of line compared with S3's cost of only $0.15 per GB.

Recall that pricing for Amazon's SimpleDB is based on 3 factors: machine utilization, data transfer (in and out), and data storage.  After the first 25 machine hours (free), each machine hour costs $0.14.  The first GB of data transferred in and out are free, and the initial pricing tiers are $0.10 per GB inbound and $0.17 per GB outbound.  After the first GB of storage used per month (free), each additional GB costs $0.25 per month. A rough calculation shows the monthly savings to be a little under $4. Still, many web hosting providers charge several dollars each month for database storage - no need for that any longer.

SimpleDB Enters Public Beta Period

In conjunction with the news of the free pricing tier, Amazon also announced that SimpleDB, while still in beta, is open to all developers. The closed beta, opened to a select group of developers late last year, has given way to a public beta period.

This is good news for me, as I am speaking at VSLive in Dallas next week discussing, among other things, SimpleDB. I despise going to conferences to learn of technologies that have no hope of impacting my development environment for many months or even years to come. There is a time and place for learning how the future will shape up, but for a hands-on coding session, I personally think it best to have the technologies available at my fingertips. This makes SimpleDB available to all the attendees.

The Official Email

Dear AWS Developer,

Amazon SimpleDB is now available in public beta; any business or developer may now sign up and start using this service immediately. Amazon SimpleDB is a web service providing the core database functions of indexing and querying. We're also excited to announce a free tier of usage for SimpleDB, as well as lower prices for storing your data. In addition, Amazon SimpleDB customers will now have access to AWS Premium Support, providing access to a 24/7, one-on-one, fast-response support channel.

Pricing Updates

To help you get started with Amazon SimpleDB, we are providing a free usage tier for at least the next six months. Each month, there is no charge for the first 25 machine hours, 1 GB of data transfer (in and out), and 1 GB of storage that you use. Standard pricing will apply beyond these usage levels, and free usage does not accumulate over time.

In addition, beginning today, Amazon SimpleDB customers will now enjoy significantly reduced storage pricing, only $0.25 per gigabyte-month. This new rate reflects an 83% reduction in storage pricing. For more information, see aws.amazon.com/simpledb.

AWS Premium Support Now Available for SimpleDB

Customers can now also sign up for AWS Premium Support of Amazon SimpleDB. AWS Premium Support offers technical assistance from the Amazon Web Services team whenever and as frequently as customers need it. Whether for operational issues or technical questions, Amazon SimpleDB customers now have access to developer support engineers 24/7, and can count on predictable response time and personalized support. To sign up for AWS Premium Support, visit aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport.

New Features for Amazon SimpleDB Coming Soon

We are also very pleased to announce plans to release two enhancements in the next few weeks that will make Amazon SimpleDB even easier to use. These enhancements will include:

• SQL-like SELECT API: With this feature, you will be able to employ a very familiar SQL-like query language when constructing queries and building applications. The SELECT API will help you be more productive with Amazon SimpleDB right from the start.
• Batch Put: Enables you to streamline the upload of multiple items or attributes, with a single batch API request rather than multiple single item calls.

We are pleased to share these exciting announcements with you, and invite you to visit aws.amazon.com/simpledb for full details.

Sincerely,

The Amazon SimpleDB Team

 

For Sale By Owner

At last, I have made the initial public release of Assembly Inspector, my mISV laboratory project I started about 3 years ago. It was born out of necessity with my work and has been an indispensable tool since that time. I put the final touches on the app and the web site early this week and officially make it public.

Now the real work begins. Marketing, support, maintenance, etc. Anyone who has been down this road with a small mISV knows the time commitments, financial ramifications, and sacrifices to realize a product with a "For Sale By Owner" sign in its yard.

I am a software developer by trade, working for a medium-sized company with established marketing, product management, development, and systems & operations groups. Taking a step away from that warm and comfy cocoon to take on all these responsibilities on my own is not a walk through my comfort zone. I'll grant you, the scale of my endeavor is only slight compared to that of Passport. However, given the first-time-ed-ness of it all combined with the traditional lack of time consistent with a guy who is a devoted employee, husband, and dad of 3 kids who are active in all manner of extra-curricular activities, and you have what should result in a sinking vessel.  We'll see.

So far, the hardest part has been getting to the first release. The psychology of moving forward incrementally now is a great burden lifted.

At any rate, I will work hard to keep this boat afloat and will try to share some of my experiences along the way.

Check out Assembly Inspector. Here's the elevator speech: Use Assembly Inspector to verify that all of a .NET assembly's dependencies (other .NET assemblies) can be loaded. You can use it to either proactively find problems with missing dependencies before you launch an application (on a server, for example) or by helping to troubleshoot a problem with missing dependencies after you have found a problem.

So now the money starts rolling in. Right?