IT Conversations is running a great podcast entitled 'Technometria: Amazon Web Services'. It features Jeff Barr from Amazon and Doug Kaye of Gigovox Media who discuss three of Amazon's most interesting and powerful Web Services: Simple Storage Service, Simple Message Queue Service and the Elastic Compute Cloud.
Doug Kaye has put together a really interesting application based entirely on these Amazon services which will enable Gigovox Media to scale out their podcasting services. As you can see from the diagram below the architecture is not simple and is highly distributed to enable extreme scalability. This scalability is enabled through Amazon's messaging service which manages the flow of messaging data within the different elastic compute cloud (essentially Web Service enabled Xen instances).
GigaVox’s new GigaVox Audio Lite architecture
The podcast also alludes to some of the current shortcomings of Amazon's service such as its inability to run SQL style databases and the fact there is essentially no quality of service guarantees from Amazon. From the tone of the conversation I would not be surprised if with we see these issues get cleared up as the services mature during the year.
The other interesting issue raised was the question of service provider interoperability or portability. Currently Amazon is the only major player offering such services but undoubtedly Google and Microsoft will one day offer the same. When this becomes a reality how easy will it to move your application from one service provider to another or mix service providers for the best deal? Arguably we could see a time where we interact with applications running on Amazon servers, storing files on Microsoft disk and persisting data to a Google database but whether these parties let this sort of thing happen is another question altogether.