Amazon Web Services, an Amazon.com company, has announced the launch of Amazon DynamoDB, a fully managed NoSQL database service that provides extremely fast and predictable performance with seamless scalability.

With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, customers can launch a new DynamoDB database table, scale up or down their request capacity for the table without downtime or performance degradation, and gain visibility into resource utilization and performance metrics.

Amazon DynamoDB enables customers to offload the administrative burdens of operating and scaling distributed databases so they don’t have to worry about hardware provisioning, setup and configuration, replication, software patching, partitioning, or cluster scaling. Customers and prospects can get started with Amazon DynamoDB by visiting www.aws.amazon.com/DynamoDB.

Unlike DynamoDB, traditional databases are not designed to scale to the performance needs of modern applications, which can experience explosive growth and cause a single database to quickly reach its capacity limits. Mitigating this by distributing a workload across multiple database servers is complex and requires significant engineering expertise and time investment by application developers. Amazon DynamoDB addresses the problem of scalability by automatically partitioning and re-partitioning data as needed to meet the latency and throughput requirements of highly demanding applications. Additionally, Amazon DynamoDB’s pay-as-you-go pricing enables customers to “dial in” and pay for only the resources they need.

“Amazon has spent more than 15 years tackling the challenges of database scalability, performance and cost-effectiveness using distributed systems and NoSQL technology,” said Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon. “Amazon DynamoDB is the result of everything we’ve learned from building large-scale, non-relational databases for Amazon.com and building highly scalable and reliable cloud computing services at AWS. Customers can now remove the operational headaches of managing distributed systems and deploy a non-relational database in a matter of minutes. DynamoDB automatically scales to enterprise needs, and is designed for rapid performance no matter the size of the database. Amazon DynamoDB is already in use by many teams and products within Amazon, including the Amazon.com advertising platform, Amazon Cloud Drive, IMDb, and Kindle.”

Amazon DynamoDB offers low, predictable latencies at any scale, and customers typically enjoy single-digit millisecond latencies for database read and write operations. Amazon DynamoDB stores data on Solid State Drives (SSDs) and replicates it synchronously across multiple AWS Availability Zones in an AWS Region to provide built-in high availability and data durability. Businesses can get started with Amazon DynamoDB using a free tier that provides 100MB of storage, and five writes and 10 reads per second (up to 40 million requests per month) free of charge.

Amazon DynamoDB also integrates with Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR). Amazon EMR allows businesses to perform complex analytics of their large datasets using a hosted pay-as-you-go Hadoop framework on AWS. With the launch of Amazon DynamoDB, it is easy for customers to use Amazon EMR to analyze datasets stored in DynamoDB, archive the results in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), while keeping the original dataset in DynamoDB intact. Businesses can also use Amazon EMR to access data in multiple stores (i.e. Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon RDS, Amazon S3), do complex analysis over this combined dataset, and store the results of this work in Amazon S3.