LongJump DaaS

LongJump's Database as a Service was featured on TechCrunch today. It appears to be a competitor to SimpleDB:

LongJump’s DaaS provides a complete environment for hosting a database that’s highly secure and web-enabled while simultaneously cutting the costs and easing the hassles for entrepreneurs and developers who would otherwise have to purchase a database server, provision it, address data access and availability issues, manage backup and replication issues, and tackle security and data protection.

They mention that they use Java on MySQL, but it does not appear that they actually expose MySQL API's. According to their sales copy, it's only REST 

My quick scan of their product pages indicate that you need to sign up for LongJump to get access. They charge by the user account as opposed to usage. I don't know if it counts as utility computing then :)

I'll sign up for an account in the next couple of weeks, but on first glance this seems to be targeted at smaller businesses and databases.

Amazon SimpleDB

Wow, I was thinking about something like SimpleDB two days ago.

SimpleDB looks awesome. It actually looks a lot like CouchDB. Maybe that's what they are using? They are charging per "CPU cycle", so they could have CouchDB servers running in EC2 and are measuring the resource usage.

Going back to my design.. I was thinking of doing something like a json+memcached+S3 storage engine. The API would store and retrieve data using json. On lookup, it would check a memcache first. If it didn't find the object in the memcache, it would pull the object from S3 and stick it in the memcache. 

Of course, my system doesn't support searching, and you'd have to build another layer for indexing/referencing data. I'll be happy to use SimpleDB.

Now Amazon needs to implement a load balancing and static IP's and I'll never have to buy a server again.