Openfount has released S3Infindisk for EC2, a product that answers a lot of wishes in the EC2 community. One of the biggest issues with EC2 is the lack of persistent storage on the server instances, and this tool is a first attempt at a solution.

Basically, when you are using EC2, everything on your server that isn’t statically defined before the machine runs goes bye-bye as soon as the machine reboots. Not a real problem for software, but for data this is a major bummer. Amazon makes S3 storage available without data transfer fees, which is wonderful. However, it takes real effort to transfer data back and forth between the systems (with something like jsh3ll), and most data-centric tools (especially database servers) expect real-time access to a working file system.

S3Infinidisk bridges this gap, allowing an EC2 instance to use S3 like a real Linux filesystem. While it is a bit of hack, it allows data tools to work the way they need to and it allows an EC2 instance to take full advantage of the AWS environment. This is a huge step forward in making EC2 a more usable environment for utility computing!

I haven’t had a chance to try the product out yet, but am excited to do so. I appreciate the licensing structure (free single-user version + commercial high-performance version), although I would prefer seeing open source. Also, since the tool is based on the FUSE subsystem, I could easily see this spreading like wildfire.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 17th, 2007 at 2:41 pm and is filed under Information Architecture, Systems Integration, Over the Horizon, Enterprise Web, AWS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.