AWS resources

Many Hadoop technologies can be deployed on AWS as part of a self-managed cluster. However, just as Amazon offers support for Elastic MapReduce, which handles Hadoop as a managed service, there are a few other services that are worth mentioning.

SimpleDB and DynamoDB

For some time, AWS has offered SimpleDB as a hosted service providing an HBase-like data model.

It has, however, largely been superseded by a more recent service from AWS, DynamoDB, located at http://aws.amazon.com/dynamodb. Though its data model is very similar to that of SimpleDB and HBase, it is aimed at a very different type of application. Where SimpleDB has quite a rich search API but is very limited in terms of size, DynamoDB provides a more constrained though constantly evolving API, but with a service guarantee of near-unlimited scalability.

The DynamoDB pricing model is particularly interesting; instead of paying for a certain number of servers hosting the service, you allocate a certain capacity for read...