Amazon Web Services (AWS) has been constantly delivering new features, to the cloud computing community. Following is a brief on their latest offerings:

EC2 Instances now available in European Union (EU)

Developers and business can now choose to host their Amazon EC2 instances in the European Union (EU). This will reduce latency and provide easier access to data. Also, these EC2 instances can operate closely with Amazon S3 instances in the EU, thus increasing their efficiency.

Public Data Sets available on EC2

Public Data Sets are now hosted on Elastic Block Store (EBS), that is part of Amazon EC2. These data sets are free for access and the users will be charged based on regular EC2 access charges. Currently, the data sets derive information from chemistry, biology and economy worlds. But the scope is huge

Amazon S3 introduces Requester Pays option

Amazon S3 buckets can now be configured, so that the requester of data is billed for all the access and bandwidth charges and not the bucket owner. Also, in conjunction with Amazon DevPay, the access to Amazon S3 can either be through a subscription or for a individual markup fees

SQL-Like SELECT API for Amazon SimpleDB

SimpleDB team has released SELECT API, which is very similar to SQL SELECT. Such improvements can reduce the learning curve for the developers and let them get started with SimpleDB, very fast

Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is an inexpensive service for storing and accessing data on the cloud (or Internet). For a brief and useful introduction to Amazon S3, refer to this post by Amit Agarwal.

By the end of 2008, Amazon S3 introduced a feature named “Requester Pays”. Requester here refers to the user of hosted data (as against the Host, who hosts data on Amazon S3)

Current Business Model

So far the business model was to charge the company or individual, hosting the data on Amazon S3, based on the data transfer.  In other words, the data host will pay for data usage.  Higher the data transfer rate, more is the charge. For detailed information, refer to Amazon S3 Pricing information

New Business Models

With the introduction of Requester Pays model, the data host can choose two additional business models.

• Host Data on Amazon S3.  Requester will pay the data transfer charges.  Higher the usage, more is the charge
• Host Data on Amazon S3 and link with Amazon Devpay.  Requester pays fixed monthly charges for data usage.  You pay for the data transfer charges.

These provide excellent business models for data providers, who wish to share data and make money out of it.  Thus, Requester Pays model might attract more business to host data with Amazon S3.

Refer to the official post, for details on Amazon S3 Requester Pays model.