Amazon Web Services has been dropping hints about a big announcement planned for this morning, and this is it.

The company just launched a new cloud database service called DynamoDB, going public with technology that it has been using internally for Amazon Cloud Drive, IMDb, Kindle, and the Amazon.com advertising platform.

Amazon, which competes against cloud services from Microsoft, Google and others, is targeting DynamoDB at companies running web applications with large databases that frequently change and experience spikes in demand. Apart from Amazon’s own products, early customers cited by the company include Elsevier, the medical and scientific publishing company, and SmugMug, the photo products printing company.

Here’s an excerpt from the description on the DynamoDB product page …

Amazon DynamoDB is designed to address the core problems of database management, performance, scalability, and reliability. Developers can create a database table that can store and retrieve any amount of data, and serve any level of request traffic. DynamoDB automatically spreads the data and traffic for the table over a sufficient number of servers to handle the request capacity specified by the customer and the amount of data stored, while maintaining consistent, fast performance. All data items are stored on Solid State Disks (SSDs) and are automatically replicated across multiple Availability Zones in a Region to provide built-in high availability and data durability.

 It’s available for limited usage on Amazon’s Free Tier. More pricing information here.
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