Amazon Cuts DynamoDB Service Prices

Amazon announced Friday that it's marking the one-year anniversary of its DynamoDB NoSQL database service by cutting service prices by as much as 85%.

Launched in January 2012, DynamoDB added a high-capacity, high-performance alternative to Amazon's SimpleDB NoSQL database service. DynamoDB is based on a database that Amazon developed internally and put into production to run its own retail operations starting in 2007. Amazon wrote a white paper about Dynamo that inspired open-source NoSQL products, including Apache Cassandra, Riak, Voldemort and others.

Highlighting DynamoDB progress in a blog posted Thursday night, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels said the service has seen "widespread adoption by customers building everything from e-commerce platforms, real-time advertising exchanges, mobile applications, Facebook applications and online games."

Vogels specifically cited the example of a Shazam mobile app powered by DynamoDB that handled an "enormous spike" in traffic tied to interactive Super Bowl ad campaigns. "After working with DynamoDB for only three days, they had already managed to go from the design phase to a fully production-ready deployment that could handle the biggest advertising event of the year," Vogels wrote.

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Amazon announced a 35% cut in provisioned throughput costs for standard DynamoDB services without long-term commitments. A chart comparing new and old prices shows prices dropping below a penny per hour per 10 write units or 50 read units in all regions.

Amazon has also lowered the price of indexed storage by 75%. In the U.S. East (Northern Virginia) region, for example, the price of data storage will drop from $1 per GB per month to $0.25.

The steepest price cuts are tied to long-term commitments for a new reserve read-write capacity option. Prices to lock in that capacity for three years are 85% off standard rates and 70% for a one-year commitment.

DynamoDB runs on dedicated servers that are tuned for NoSQL performance, according to Amazon. All data is stored on fast solid state drives that are automatically replicated across multiple availability zones.

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