Amazon launched S3 in mid March and yesterday claimed to manage over 800 millions data objects. It is indeed a successful and quick start. I agree with Marshall Kirkpatrick that, besides being a good business model, services like S3 are also a key factor for innovation. They make true the dream of a solo developer able to deploy an AJAX application to the web without worrying about how to scale it out, if it becomes popular.

Moreover, lots of interesting stuff is growing on top of S3.

Bill Donahue’s Openfount is a set of Ajax tools to overcome the limitation of XMLHttpRequests, constrained to the realm of the origin server. It would be nice to host Ajax application on S3, but this security measure (very much needed) makes remote storage services suitable only for static objects. John Udell explains how it works:

Enter Openfount’s Queued Server. Instead of contacting a remote server directly, the AJAX client enqueues requests on S3, and reads responses from S3. Elsewhere on the Internet, you locate the server that reads those requests from S3, processes them, and writes the responses back to S3. That server can offer services directly, can proxy for remote services, or both.

This nice project is probably becoming obsolete since yesterday, when Amazon officially releasead its own SQS, Simple Queue Service leveraging the S3 infrastructure.

Amazon SQS offers a reliable, highly scalable hosted queue for storing messages as they travel between computers. By using Amazon SQS, developers can simply move data between distributed application components performing different tasks, without losing messages or requiring each component to be always available. Using Amazon SQS queues frees developers from worrying about how to transport or store information, allowing them to focus on building distinctive applications for their customers.

Infatiguable Dave Winer has been recently playing with little and yet unnamed application.

It’s a nice little folder on my desktop called Amazon S3. When I drag a file into the folder, it goes to the proper place in Amazon’s cloud. When I create a sub-folder and put a file into it, it also goes to the right place.

There are similar efforts around (for example JungleDisk), they all aim to store any data securely onto S3 servers, and access it from any computer just like a local hard drive. But I place my bet on Dave’s renowned ability to keep it simple and effective.