January 18, 2012
Amazon’s unveiling earlier today of DynamoDB, Amazon’s new datastore, is good for the NoSQL movement and great for customer choice.
We were early believers in the set of principles outlined in the original Amazon Dynamo paper that was published in 2007. In fact, we were so impressed, that we built our entire company around it. We launched Riak as open source software in 2009 and this has created a community of thousands of loyal users. The result has been a distributed database that that has been tested and proven to massively scale. Just ask Voxer: Walkie Talkie App Voxer Soars Past Ten Billion Operations Per Day Powered by Riak.
More importantly, the Amazon announcement tells us the power of NoSQL. Almost five years following the release of the Dynamo paper, the world’s largest e-commerce company is doubling down on NoSQL and the role of key-value stores. This aligns with a trend that has accelerated over the past year. The advantages from a scalable database that can elastically grow and shrink, with high throughput at very low-latency, and that never loses a write are increasingly viewed as highly compelling. Not to mention the massive cost advantage – infrastructure and operational savings – versus last generation architectures. Amazon has acted (again) and it further reiterates that others should too.
At Riak, we are in favor of anything that expands customer choice. A dynamo-as-a-service offered by Amazon on their ecosystem will appeal to some. For others, the benefits of a Dynamo-inspired product that can be deployed on other public clouds, behind-the-firewall, or not on the cloud at all, will be critical.
For cloud providers, we believe they will see the wisdom in Amazon’s decision to provide a fully managed, Dynamo-inspired, NoSQL product. Of course, we know where they can get one!
Some will choose DynamoDB in the Amazon cloud, some will chose other Dynamo-inspired databases such as Riak behind their own firewall, some will chose Dynamo-inspired databases in clouds other than Amazon. It’s good to have choices.
Congratulations again to Amazon for providing leadership in cloud technology.
