Amazon Launches "Elastic Block Store" as a Storage Service for EC2

Amazon continues to lead the way to enable cloud computing based application and service businesses.  This represents an additional proof-point of my vision of the "future state" of enterprise software as:

-Delivered OnDemand
-End-User Centric
-Social
-Device Agnostic
-Flow-based
-Voice / Visual / Analytics driven

Werner Vogels summarizes some of the key points of the Amazon ESB launch.

"Today marks the launch of Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store), the long awaited persistent storage service for EC2. Details can be found on the EC2 detail page, the press release and Jeff Barr's posting over on the AWS evangelists blog. Also the folks at Rightscale have two detailed postings: why Amazon EBS mattersAmazon EBS explained.

I have written before about the basic features of Amazon EBS:

• Amazon EBS will be offered in the form of storage volumes which you can mount into your EC2 instance as a raw block storage device. It basically looks like an unformatted hard disk. Once you have the volume mounted for the first time you can format it with any file system you want or if you have advanced applications such as high-end database engines, you could use it directly.
• Developers can create multiple volumes, in size ranging from 1 GB to 1TB. This volume will be created within a specified Availability Zone and will be accessible by your EC2 instances running in that Availability Zone. As to be expected with a volume abstraction only one instance can have the volume mounted at any given time. Volumes can migrate and be reattached to other instances if necessary for failure handling or application migration reasons.
• The consistency of data written to this device is similar to that of other local and network-attached devices; it is under control of the developer when and how to force flush data to disk if you want to bypass the traditional lazy-writer functionality in the operating systems file-cache. Because of the session oriented model for access to the volume you do"

Dion Hinchcliffe offered a couple of tweets with his perspective: