Amazon announces persistent storage for EC2

April 14, 2008

Google might have garnered all the press lately, but in my book, especially for many of the applications that interest me, Amazon continues to be the leader and innovator. Last night Jeff Barr kept us on tenterhooks in twitter with tweets announcing that he was close to posting about a big announcement. Well, big it was. One of the more common complaints about EC2 has been the lack of persistent storage for an EC2 instance. Well looks like Amazon is addressing this issue (this has not been rolled out yet, but you can request early access)

From an email that I received overnight

These volumes exist independently from any Amazon EC2 instances, and will behave like raw, unformatted hard drives or block devices, which may then be formatted and configured based on the needs of your application.

and

You will be able to create volumes ranging in size from 1 GB to 1 TB, and will be able to attach multiple volumes to a single instance. Volumes are designed for high throughput, low latency access from Amazon EC2, and can be attached to any running EC2 instance where they will show up as a device inside of the instance. This feature will make it even easier to run everything from relational databases to distributed file systems to Hadoop processing clusters using Amazon EC2.

This is the killer. You get significantly more flexibility within EC2, making it a true virtual environment (just being able to attach a MySQL database does that). That you can pretty much dial up a TB of space is very cool. It makes me think about how we currently do certain tasks, e.g. protein structure prediction, or fragment-based drug design and think about new ways of approaching those problem with these kinds of resources. Perhaps as Amazon builds out capacity, they can start working with academic groups that currently do not have access to massive resources other than supercomputer centers, but have innovative ways of solving such problems.

As I keep reminding people, we are just getting started. Computing is only going to get more interesting. From accelerated machines under your desk to access to the cloud, things are finally getting more accessible and very usable.

Further reading
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