Amazon Web Services Launches ``Amazon S3,'' a Simple Storage Service for Software Developers

Amazon Web Services today announced "Amazon S3(TM)," a simplestorage service that offers software developers a highly scalable,reliable, and low-latency data storage infrastructure at very lowcosts. Amazon S3 is available today at http://aws.amazon.com/s3.

Amazon S3 is storage for the Internet. It's designed to makeweb-scale computing easier for developers. Amazon S3 provides a simpleweb services interface that can be used to store and retrieve anyamount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives anydeveloper access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast,inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run itsown global network of web sites. The service aims to maximize benefitsof scale and to pass those benefits on to developers.

Amazon S3 Functionality

Amazon S3 is intentionally built with a minimal feature set. Thefocus is on simplicity and robustness.

-- Write, read, and delete objects containing from 1 byte to 5 gigabytes of data each. The number of objects that can be stored is unlimited.

-- Each object is stored and retrieved via a unique developer-assigned key.

-- Objects can be made private or public, and rights can be assigned to specific users.

-- Uses standards-based REST and SOAP interfaces designed to work with any Internet-development toolkit.

Amazon S3 Design Requirements

Amazon built S3 to fulfill the following design requirements:

-- Scalable: Amazon S3 can scale in terms of storage, request rate, and users to support an unlimited number of web-scale applications. It uses scale as an advantage: adding nodes to the system increases, not decreases, its availability, speed, throughput, capacity, and robustness.

-- Reliable: Store data durably, with 99.99% availability. There can be no single points of failure. All failures must be tolerated or repaired by the system without any downtime.

-- Fast: Amazon S3 must be fast enough to support high-performance applications. Server-side latency must be insignificant relative to Internet latency. Any performance bottlenecks can be fixed by simply adding nodes to the system.

-- Inexpensive: Amazon S3 is built from inexpensive commodity hardware components. As a result, frequent node failure is the norm and must not affect the overall system. It must be hardware-agnostic, so that savings can be captured as Amazon continues to drive down infrastructure costs.

-- Simple: Building highly scalable, reliable, fast, and inexpensive storage is difficult. Doing so in a way that makes it easy to use for any application anywhere is more difficult. Amazon S3 must do both.

A forcing function for the design was that a single Amazon S3distributed system must support the needs of both internal Amazonapplications and external developers of any application. This meansthat it must be fast and reliable enough to run Amazon.com's websites, while flexible enough that any developer can use it for anydata storage need.

Amazon S3 Design Principles

Amazon used the following principles of distributed system designto meet Amazon S3 requirements:

-- Decentralization: Use fully decentralized techniques to remove scaling bottlenecks and single points of failure.

-- Asynchrony: The system makes progress under all circumstances.

-- Autonomy: The system is designed such that individual components can make decisions based on local information.

-- Local responsibility: Each individual component is responsible for achieving its consistency; this is never the burden of its peers.

-- Controlled concurrency: Operations are designed such that no or limited concurrency control is required.

-- Failure tolerant: The system considers the failure of components to be a normal mode of operation and continues operation with no or minimal interruption.

-- Controlled parallelism: Abstractions used in the system are of such granularity that parallelism can be used to improve performance and robustness of recovery or the introduction of new nodes.

-- Decompose into small, well-understood building blocks: Do not try to provide a single service that does everything for everyone, but instead build small components that can be used as building blocks for other services.

-- Symmetry: Nodes in the system are identical in terms of functionality, and require no or minimal node-specific configuration to function.

-- Simplicity: The system should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.

"Amazon S3 is based on the idea that quality Internet-basedstorage should be taken for granted," said Andy Jassy, vice presidentof Amazon Web Services. "It helps free developers from worrying aboutwhere they are going to store data, whether it will be safe andsecure, if it will be available when they need it, the costsassociated with server maintenance, or whether they have enoughstorage available. Amazon S3 enables developers to focus on innovatingwith data, rather than figuring out how to store it."

S3 lets developers pay only for what they consume and there is nominimum fee. Developers pay just $0.15 per gigabyte of storage permonth and $0.20 per gigabyte of data transferred.

Early S3 Applications

University of California Berkeley "Stardust@Home" Team: Thescience team at the University of California Berkeley responsible forNASA's "Stardust@Home" project(http://stardustathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/) is using Amazon S3 to storeand deliver the 60 million images that represent the data collectedfrom their dust particle aerogel experiment. These images will bedelivered to 100,000 volunteers around the world who scan the imageslooking for dust particles from comet Wild2.

"We quickly ran into challenges when we started the project usingour own infrastructure," said Andrew Westphal, project director ofStardust@Home. "Using Amazon S3 has allowed us to proceed withouthaving to worry about building out the massive storage infrastructurewe realized that we needed to successfully complete the project. Thefact that Amazon S3 is an Internet-connected storage service isparticularly useful to us as we expect the data examination phase ofthe project to take only a few months. We can quickly ramp up and backdown again without a huge investment."

CastingWords: Podcast transcription service provider CastingWordsis already using Amazon S3. CastingWords transcribes audio files intohigh-quality text at a rate of $0.42 per minute of audio. AnotherAmazon Web Services solution, Amazon Mechanical Turk(http://aws.amazon.com/mturk), lets CastingWords access a network ofhumans to transcribe the podcasts inexpensively, quickly, and withhigh quality. CastingWords uses Amazon S3 to store and retrieve theoriginal audio files and the transcribed texts.

"Amazon S3 provides CastingWords with easy-to-use, reliablestorage that allows us to concentrate on building our business and notworry about storage solutions. Its reliability and Internetaccessibility mean that it's always there when and where we need it,"said CastingWords founder Nathan McFarland. "It is simple to use andit works so well that it eliminated one of the many things we have tothink about, which is huge when starting a small business."

FilmmakerLIVE.com: Developer of storyboarding software for themotion picture industry, FilmmakerLIVE.com is using Amazon S3 to storeand share digital storyboard elements with its customers around theworld. After only a few weeks of using Amazon S3, the company realizedit could also help other filmmakers and entrepreneurs take advantageof Amazon's economies of scale that Amazon S3 offers.FilmmakerLIVE.com's development manager Don Alvarez is currentlybuilding this new service, which he expects to announce this summer.

"Building a data center that meets the needs of online filmmakersis serious business when you consider the redundant hardware, racks ofhard drives, filtered power lines, 24x7 monitoring, and all the othernecessary components," said Alvarez. "With Amazon S3, we have instantaccess to a virtual data center that was far beyond anything we couldhave hoped to build ourselves. The biggest benefit for us is thatAmazon S3 lets us concentrate our resources on what we do best,building tools for filmmakers."

About Amazon Web Services

Launched in July 2002, the Amazon Web Services platform exposestechnology and product data from Amazon and its affiliates, enablingdevelopers to build innovative and entrepreneurial applications ontheir own. More than 150,000 developers have signed up to use AmazonWeb Services since its inception. Applications built using Amazon WebServices range from podcast transcription services and marketplacesfor web site advertising space to enhanced sites that advertise Amazonproducts from Amazon sites and integrated solutions for retailersselling merchandise on Amazon sites. Developers make money by sellingthe applications they build, charging for the services they offer, orgenerating referral fees from the Associates sites they build. AmazonWeb Services is a division of Amazon Digital Services, Inc.

About Amazon.com, Inc.

Amazon.com, Inc., (Nasdaq:AMZN), a Fortune 500 company based inSeattle, opened on the World Wide Web in July 1995 and today offersEarth's Biggest Selection. Amazon.com seeks to be Earth's mostcustomer-centric company, where customers can find and discoveranything they might want to buy online, and endeavors to offer itscustomers the lowest possible prices. Amazon.com and other sellersoffer millions of unique new, refurbished and used items in categoriessuch as health and personal care, jewelry and watches, gourmet food,sports and outdoors, apparel and accessories, books, music, DVDs,electronics and office, toys and baby, and home and garden.

Amazon and its affiliates operate websites, includingwww.amazon.com, www.amazon.co.uk, www.amazon.de, www.amazon.co.jp,www.amazon.fr, www.amazon.ca, and www.joyo.com.

As used herein, "Amazon.com," "we," "our" and similar termsinclude Amazon.com, Inc., and its subsidiaries, unless the contextindicates otherwise.

Forward-Looking Statement

This announcement contains forward-looking statements within themeaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21Eof the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Actual results may differsignificantly from management's expectations. These forward-lookingstatements involve risks and uncertainties that include, among others,risks related to competition, management of growth, potentialfluctuations in operating results, international expansion, outcomesof legal proceedings and claims, fulfillment center optimization,seasonality, commercial agreements, acquisitions and strategictransactions, foreign exchange rates, system interruption, significantamount of indebtedness, inventory, limited operating history,government regulation and taxation, payments, fraud, consumer trends,and new business areas. More information about factors thatpotentially could affect Amazon.com's financial results is included inAmazon.com's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission,including its Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December31, 2005, and all subsequent filings.