We're hearing of more and more startups using Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) for their storage needs; and this stat will please both them and their users. Webmetrics reported today that Amazon S3 maintained more than 99.99 percent uptime for the month of October, exceeding the performance requirement of its recently introduced SLA. Webmetrics monitored the response times and availability for the REST- and SOAP-based APIs for Amazon S3 during October, using its GlobalWatch Monitoring platform. Performance results for each API were as follows:
| Web Service | Average Uptime | Average Response Time |
| Amazon S3 REST API | 99.9915% | 1.63 sec | Amazon S3 SOAP API | 99.9912% | 1.55 sec |
S3 has more than five billion objects currently under management; including for 37Signals, webmail.us, YouOS, ElephantDrive, adaptiveblue, and more. Indeed just this week PollDaddy, the poll app we use at R/WW, reported they'd switched to S3. Polldaddy told us that "the system [S3] is very stable and all polls will now be served off Amazon S3 so there should never be any lag."
Starting October 1st, Amazon introduced a new SLA for S3 guaranteeing users 99.9 percent service uptime. If uptime is less than 99 percent, customers can apply for a service credit of 25 percent of their total S3 charges for the month. If the uptime is 99 percent but less than 99.9 percent, customers can apply for a service credit of 10 percent of their monthly charges.
Once again we're seeing the benefits of Amazon's HaaS (Hardware as a Service) strategy. As Emre Sokullu said in his article, Amazon is leveraging its deep scalability know-how and expertise. It's making web publishing even easier and cheaper - and reliable. This is a real game changer on the Web, especially in this new age of utility computing.
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Should the average response time really be given in seconds and not milliseconds?
Posted by: Justin | November 2, 2007 4:09 AMAmazon storage does a great job!
Posted by: Joseph Pally | November 2, 2007 6:04 AMThats pretty good for S3, but webhosts have come to expect 5 9's of reliability or higher. 100% uptime is really the goal these days. The S3 SLA isn't all that great either.
Posted by: Travis Stoliker | November 2, 2007 10:53 AMI suppose this is good news - but what about the time when they went down for nearly a whole day a few months back taking thousands of sites with them. If they included that in their data then their 99.99% would be more like 99.5% which tbh is nothing to write home about.
None the less, S3 has proved an excellent, easy to use, and (mostly) reliable service for us and many many others :)
Posted by: Marcus | November 2, 2007 10:58 AMJustin, our monitoring does more than simply verify S3, but runs a Web Services transaction, verifying the validity of the response as well.
Please click on the appropriate widget on this page www.webmetrics.com/widgetdir_amazon.html.
On behalf of Webmetrics
Posted by: Arthur Meadows | November 2, 2007 4:46 PMI'm confused about the PollDaddy reference. What would they move to S3? S3 is a file storage service... what static files do their polls have? I looked at the JavaScript source and saw only references to the polldaddy.com domain.
Posted by: Dan Grossman | November 2, 2007 6:29 PMAmazon's CIO is retiring after 10 years, Bezos hides an elaborate tribute page as a link in a tiny invisible Gif at the bottom of the Sports & Outdoors page
http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/105-8510626-2747630?ie=UTF8&docId=1000150321
Posted by: Search◊ Engines Web | November 2, 2007 7:34 PM@ Dan Grossman
Hi Dan,
I work with PollDaddy.com. We are not moving to S3 for another 2 weeks but just to answer a couple of your comments. First off all we can place our polls on S3 simply because they are static JS files. We only do some processing on our server when someone votes, so S3 is a perfect fit for us.
And secondly you can redirect part of a domain to S3 so s3.amazon.com will not always show up for content coming from their servers.
Cheers,
Posted by: Lenny | November 4, 2007 4:35 AMLenny.