Amazon’s latest in their Web Services collection is SimpleDB. Here’s what Amazon describes their latest service as:

“Amazon SimpleDB is a web service for running queries on structured data in real time. This service works in close conjunction with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), collectively providing the ability to store, process and query data sets in the cloud. These services are designed to make web-scale computing easier and more cost-effective for developers.”

This is something that developers on the EC2 and S3 platform have been waiting for for quite a while. Let’s wait and see if this service matches up to their expecations. This service is still in Limited Beta, so go ahead and sign up to be included in the program.

Their current rates are:

Machine Utilization - $0.14 per Amazon SimpleDB Machine Hour consumed

Amazon SimpleDB measures the machine utilization of each request and charges based on the amount of machine capacity used to complete the particular request (QUERY, GET, PUT, etc.), normalized to the hourly capacity of a circa 2007 1.7 GHz Xeon processor.

Data Transfer

$0.10 per GB - all data transfer in

$0.18 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.16 per GB - next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.13 per GB - data transfer out / month over 50 TB

Data transfer “in” and “out” refers to transfer into and out of Amazon SimpleDB. Data transferred between Amazon SimpleDB and other Amazon Web Services is free of charge (i.e., $0.00 per GB).

Structured Data Storage - $1.50 per GB-month

Amazon SimpleDB measures the size of your billable data by adding the raw byte size of the data you upload + 45 bytes of overhead for each item, attribute name and attribute-value pair.

Link: http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=342335011