Amazon S3 Online Storage Service Draws Businesses of All Sizes

WebKnowHow
Thursday, July 13, 2006; 08:28 AM

Altexa, Amazon.com, Elephant Drive, Jungle Disk, LA NACION, MediaSilo, Microsoft, and SmugMug among companies storing more than 800 million total data objects using Amazon S3 from Amazon Web Services.

Early World Cup victories by Argentina triggered a flood of website traffic for the country's second-largest newspaper, LA NACION. Uncertain whether its banner ads would survive the traffic spike, LANACION.COM searched for a better solution to store and serve ads that was cheap enough not to cut into advertising profits, simple enough to get up and running immediately, and massively scalable in case the team kept winning. That's when LANACION.COM discovered Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Within hours, the site started storing ads in Amazon S3 to ease the load on its servers. After seeing how well Amazon S3 performed and how much the paper saved by using the service, LANACION.COM moved all of its ads to Amazon S3.

Nearly 7,000 miles away in Redmond, Washington, Microsoft wanted to expand its MSDN Direct Student Download program. "We needed a storage and delivery solution that made it simple, fast, and dependable for students in hundreds of countries around the world to download our software at any time," said Joe Wilson, Director of Academic Initiatives in the Developer Marketing division at Microsoft Corp. Microsoft wanted to scale the program up without any upfront or increased ongoing expenses, which is why it chose Amazon S3. Microsoft expanded the program while managing to cut storage costs by more than 90 percent since switching to Amazon S3. "In addition to being easy for our users, Amazon S3 allows us to deploy and scale up in a very cost-efficient manner," said Wilson.

Growing photo-sharing company SmugMug was on the brink of becoming the victim of its own success in early 2006. Growth was accelerating rapidly and CEO Don MacAskill was concerned his storage solution for the hundreds of millions of images SmugMug managed would not reliably or cost-efficiently meet the scaling requirements he would soon have. With just one programmer and a tight budget, SmugMug needed storage that was inexpensive, simple and reliable. "We looked at Amazon S3's pricing, design and ease-of-use, and were blown away. Amazon S3 is simple and elegant, so much so that it was basically a drop-in addition to our current infrastructure," said MacAskill. SmugMug took just five days to integrate with Amazon S3 and has saved $500,000 in storage expenditures since starting to use the service in March while adding more than 10 terabytes of images each month - all with zero increase in staff or data center space. "Amazon S3 makes it possible for SmugMug to compete with huge, deep-pocketed companies without having to raise massive amounts of cash for hardware," said MacAskill.

These examples represent the breadth of companies choosing to use the web-scale storage offered by Amazon S3. Global enterprises like Microsoft are using Amazon S3 to dramatically reduce their storage costs without compromising scale or reliability. On the opposite end of the spectrum, small but fast-growing businesses such as SmugMug that depend on storage are using Amazon S3's benefits of scale and cost-efficiency that were previously only available to large companies. Amazon.com continues to use Amazon S3 for its own business as well, recently launching new digital initiatives (described below under "Amazon.com") that store and retrieve large data files using Amazon S3.

Amazon S3 (http://aws.amazon.com/s3) provides a web services interface that lets businesses simply and quickly store and retrieve any amount of data. Amazon S3 uses the same highly scalable data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. There is no minimum fee and developers pay only for what they use at a rate of just $0.15 per gigabyte of storage per month and $0.20 per gigabyte of data transferred. Amazon S3 is available from Amazon Web Services (http://aws.amazon.com), a subsidiary of Amazon.com. Launched on March 14, Amazon S3 now holds more than 800 million total data objects.