Amazon today released DynamoDB, a speedy, scalable database service designed for Web applications.

DynamoDB addresses the needs of today's Web-based apps, which often face challenges with increases in traffic, users, and data. DynamoDB gives its users the database capacity they need and allows them to ramp up that capacity as needed without requiring any administration, new equipment or software. Amazon takes care of all of that for you.

The capabilities of DynamoDB were touted this afternoon by Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon. The service automatically spreads data and traffic across multiple servers to meet the capacity requirements as requested by a customer, he said. Amazon uses Solid State Drives (SSDs) to store data, enhancing performance."

Through the AWS Management console, users can create a new Amazon DynamDB database table and can scale capacity up or down without taking the database offline. Although customers have no database administrative duties to perform, they can monitor resource utilization and performance metrics.

Other features include: built-in fault tolerance: automatically replicated data; cryptographic security methods; integration with Amazon CloudWatch; as well as integration with Amazon Elastic MapReduce, which allows business to perform analytics of large datasets.

As with EC2, customers pay for what they use. New customers can try DynamoDB for free, receiving 100 MB of free storage with 5 writes/second and 10 reads/second of ongoing throughput capacity.

Data storage is priced at $1 per GB/month. Users are also charged for data "in" and "out" transfer rates, namely the data transferred into and out of Amazon DynamoDB.