Fast and fully managed database service removes administrative burden of operating distributed databases and provides seamless scalability

SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 18, 2012-- Amazon Web Services LLC, an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), today announced the launch of Amazon DynamoDB, a fully managed NoSQL database service that provides extremely fast and predictable performance with seamless scalability. With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, customers can launch a new DynamoDB database table, scale up or down their request capacity for the table without downtime or performance degradation, and gain visibility into resource utilization and performance metrics. Amazon DynamoDB enables customers to offload the administrative burdens of operating and scaling distributed databases so they don’t have to worry about hardware provisioning, setup and configuration, replication, software patching, partitioning, or cluster scaling. To get started with Amazon DynamoDB, visit www.aws.amazon.com/DynamoDB.

Unlike DynamoDB, traditional databases are not designed to scale to the performance needs of modern applications, which can experience explosive growth and cause a single database to quickly reach its capacity limits. Mitigating this by distributing a workload across multiple database servers is complex and requires significant engineering expertise and time investment by application developers. Amazon DynamoDB addresses the problem of scalability by automatically partitioning and re-partitioning data as needed to meet the latency and throughput requirements of highly demanding applications. Additionally, Amazon DynamoDB’s pay-as-you-go pricing enables customers to “dial in” and pay for only the resources they need.

“Amazon has spent more than 15 years tackling the challenges of database scalability, performance and cost-effectiveness using distributed systems and NoSQL technology,” said Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon. “Amazon DynamoDB is the result of everything we’ve learned from building large-scale, non-relational databases for Amazon.com and building highly scalable and reliable cloud computing services at AWS. Customers can now remove the operational headaches of managing distributed systems and deploy a non-relational database in a matter of minutes. DynamoDB automatically scales to enterprise needs, and is designed for rapid performance no matter the size of the database. Amazon DynamoDB is already in use by many teams and products within Amazon, including the Amazon.com advertising platform, Amazon Cloud Drive, IMDb, and Kindle.”

Amazon DynamoDB offers low, predictable latencies at any scale, and customers typically enjoy single-digit millisecond latencies for database read and write operations. Amazon DynamoDB stores data on Solid State Drives (SSDs) and replicates it synchronously across multiple AWS Availability Zones in an AWS Region to provide built-in high availability and data durability. Businesses can get started with Amazon DynamoDB using a free tier that provides 100MB of storage, and five writes and 10 reads per second (up to 40 million requests per month) free of charge.

Amazon DynamoDB also integrates with Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR). Amazon EMR allows businesses to perform complex analytics of their large datasets using a hosted pay-as-you-go Hadoop framework on AWS. With the launch of Amazon DynamoDB, it is easy for customers to use Amazon EMR to analyze datasets stored in DynamoDB, archive the results in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), while keeping the original dataset in DynamoDB intact. Businesses can also use Amazon EMR to access data in multiple stores (i.e. Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon RDS, Amazon S3), do complex analysis over this combined dataset, and store the results of this work in Amazon S3.

"Elsevier is a $3 billion enterprise that provides science and health information to more than 30 million scientists, students and medical professionals worldwide. Each year we publish thousands of books, nearly 2,000 journals and more than 250,000 articles, which means our datasets are constantly and rapidly changing," said Darren Person, Chief Architect of Elsevier. "We are always evaluating new technologies that will enable us to handle our large, varying workloads. Operating a distributed data store on our own is orders of magnitude more complicated and expensive to manage than traditional databases. DynamoDB delivers a high-performance service that can be easily scaled up or down to meet our needs, helping us eliminate complexity and lower costs."

"DynamoDB is a truly revolutionary product which allows SmugMug to finally realize its goal of being 100% cloud-based,” said Don MacAskill, CEO of SmugMug. “I love how DynamoDB enables us to provision our desired throughput, and achieve low latency and seamless scale, even with our constantly growing workloads. Even though we have years of experience with large, complex architectures, we are happy to be finally out of the business of managing it ourselves, and to be using DynamoDB to get even higher performance and stability than we can achieve on our own. Most importantly, DynamoDB allows SmugMug to spend even more time and energy on what really matters – our product and customer experience.”

“DynamoDB solves our problem of distributing and storing high-volume writes in a straightforward and cost-effective way," said Rob Storrs, Head of Engineering at Formspring. "Our rapid growth meant that we were spending significant resources managing our own large-scale database systems. DynamoDB gives us low latency and easy scalability, which allows us to keep our costs low and our engineers focused on building what our customers want. It's another example of AWS listening to their customers and building services that solve real problems."

“Prior to Amazon DynamoDB, many of our customers were forced to spend weeks forecasting, planning, and preparing their database deployments to perform well at peak loads,” said Raju Gulabani, VP of Database Services at Amazon Web Services. “DynamoDB makes those processes obsolete. Now businesses can quickly add capacity with a few clicks in the management console. During our private beta, we saw customers successfully scale up from 100s of writes per second to over 100,000 writes per second without having to change a single line of code. This level of elasticity, coupled with consistent performance, reduces the cost and the risk of building a fast-growing application.”

About Amazon Web Services

Launched in 2006, Amazon Web Services (AWS) began exposing key infrastructure services to businesses in the form of web services -- now widely known as cloud computing. The ultimate benefit of cloud computing, and AWS, is the ability to leverage a new business model and turn capital infrastructure expenses into variable costs. Businesses no longer need to plan and procure servers and other IT resources weeks or months in advance. Using AWS, businesses can take advantage of Amazon's expertise and economies of scale to access resources when their business needs them, delivering results faster and at a lower cost. Today, Amazon Web Services provides a highly reliable, scalable, low-cost infrastructure platform in the cloud that powers hundreds of thousands of enterprise, government and startup customers businesses in 190 countries around the world. AWS offers over 21 different services, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS). AWS services are available to customers from data center locations in the U.S., Brazil, Europe, Japan and Singapore.

About Amazon.com

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN), a Fortune 500 company based in Seattle, opened on the World Wide Web in July 1995 and today offers Earth's Biggest Selection. Amazon.com, Inc. seeks to be Earth's most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online, and endeavors to offer its customers the lowest possible prices. Amazon.com and other sellers offer millions of unique new, refurbished and used items in categories such as Books; Movies, Music & Games; Digital Downloads; Electronics & Computers; Home & Garden; Toys, Kids & Baby; Grocery; Apparel, Shoes & Jewelry; Health & Beauty; Sports & Outdoors; and Tools, Auto & Industrial. Amazon Web Services provides Amazon's developer customers with access to in-the-cloud infrastructure services based on Amazon's own back-end technology platform, which developers can use to enable virtually any type of business. The new latest generation Kindle is the lightest, most compact Kindle ever and features the same 6-inch, most advanced electronic ink display that reads like real paper even in bright sunlight. Kindle Touch is a new addition to the Kindle family with an easy-to-use touch screen that makes it easier than ever to turn pages, search, shop, and take notes - still with all the benefits of the most advanced electronic ink display. Kindle Touch 3G is the top of the line e-reader and offers the same new design and features of Kindle Touch, with the unparalleled added convenience of free 3G. Kindle Fire is the Kindle for movies, TV shows, music, books, magazines, apps, games and web browsing with all the content, free storage in the Amazon Cloud, Whispersync, Amazon Silk (Amazon's new revolutionary cloud-accelerated web browser), vibrant color touch screen, and powerful dual-core processor.

Amazon and its affiliates operate websites, including www.amazon.com, www.amazon.co.uk, www.amazon.de, www.amazon.co.jp, www.amazon.fr, www.amazon.ca, www.amazon.cn, www.amazon.it, and www.amazon.es. As used herein, "Amazon.com," "we," "our" and similar terms include Amazon.com, Inc., and its subsidiaries, unless the context indicates otherwise.

Forward-Looking Statements

This announcement contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Actual results may differ significantly from management's expectations. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that include, among others, risks related to competition, management of growth, new products, services and technologies, potential fluctuations in operating results, international expansion, outcomes of legal proceedings and claims, fulfillment center optimization, seasonality, commercial agreements, acquisitions and strategic transactions, foreign exchange rates, system interruption, inventory, government regulation and taxation, payments and fraud. More information about factors that potentially could affect Amazon.com's financial results is included in Amazon.com's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K and subsequent filings.

Source: Amazon.com, Inc.

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