Last week I received an email from Amazon indicating that their new persistent storage offering may be released to the public in a matter of days.
Several blogs are also reporting that Amazon's Elastic Block Store (EBS) is about to go live. From the various posts the service seems to be aimed at simple VM attached storage volume. These volumes can be thought of as raw, unformatted disk drives which can be formatted and then used as desired (or even used as raw storage if you'd like). Volumes can range in size from 1 GB on up to 1 TB; you can create and attach several of them to each EC2 instance. They are designed for low latency, high throughput access from Amazon EC2. Needless to say, you can use these volumes to host a relational database.
I can't wait to try this out. For some unknown reason, we haven't been invited into the beta, so like everyone else we will be eagerly awaiting access.
Here's the original email.
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This is a notice to let you know that Amazon EC2 instance(s) associated with your account are operating on an older software version that will not be able to take advantage of some upcoming new features. The affected instances are listed below.
In the coming weeks, Amazon EC2 will be launching a new persistent storage offering. This is an advanced alert that the instances listed will not be able to take advantage of this new feature. Other instances that are not listed will be able to take advantage of it.
For more information about the persistent storage offering, please see the following blog posts:
http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2008/04/persistent_storage_for_amazon.html
http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2008/04/block-to-the-fu.html
