Amazon Debuts Online Storage Service

Posted on March 16, 2006

Amazon.com has debuted an online storage service called A3. The service a pay for what you use pricing model. You pay $0.15 per GB-Month of storage used and $0.20 per GB of data transferred. Here are some of the features of A3.

Write, read, and delete objects containing from 1 byte to 5 gigabytes of data each. The number of objects you can store is unlimited.
Each object is stored and retrieved via a unique, developer-assigned key.
Authentication mechanisms are provided to ensure that data is kept secure from unauthorized access. Objects can be made private or public, and rights can be granted to specific users.
Uses standards-based REST and SOAP interfaces designed to work with any Internet-development toolkit.
Built to be flexible so that protocol or functional layers can easily be added. Default download protocol is HTTP. A BitTorrent protocol interface is provided to lower costs for high-scale distribution. Additional interfaces will be added in the future.

Several blogs are saying this means Amazon.com is no longer just a web retailer That argument is clearly true as these services are targeted at online businesses, such as publishers, and clearly falls in the business-to-business arena. Colin Faulkingham points out S3's BitTorrent support. Amazon is still a retailer but they have an excellent team of developers that will help them create digital offerings and move rapidly into digital media downloads.

STORAGE
AMAZON