A traditional, clustered relational database requires a sizable upfront capital outlay, is complex to design, and often requires extensive and repetitive database administration. Amazon SimpleDB is dramatically simpler, requiring no schema, automatically indexing your data and providing a simple API for storage and access. This approach eliminates the administrative burden of data modeling, index maintenance, and performance tuning. Developers gain access to this functionality within Amazon’s proven computing environment, are able to scale instantly, and pay only for what they use.

Using SimpleDB with SimpleDeployr

At Appoxy, we strongly believe that using a cloud NOSQL solution like SimpleDB is a solid choice for many applications.  In this case, you would simply backend your application with SimpleDB, add your credentials to your projects config files, and you're off to the races!  Then, every launched server directly accesses SimpleDB.  No need to launch or manage any database infrastructure.

For Ruby on Rails, we encourage checking out the SimpleRecord library which is a drop in replacement for ActiveRecord  - making it super easy to backend a Rails app with SimpleDB.

For More Information

We encourage you to explore SimpleDB for your application.  The two places you can start would be the Amazon AWS official site, as well as contacting Appoxy.  We have become experts in utilizing the AWS stack for super scalable apps.