Amazon’s Simple Storage Service just launched:
Amazon S3 is storage for the Internet. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.
Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers.
This looks pretty interesting — no startup or minimum monthly fees, just “pay as you go” for storage and bandwidth on a monthly basis. My initial thought is it would be good for hosting larger files like podcasts, screencasts, or video. I wonder if the implementation would also work for small, more granular data. Could you build a product or website completely using S3 as the backend database?