The New York Times Open blog takes a look at Amazon’s SimpleDB. I have to agree with him, web-scale computing architecture is a fascinating topic. I’ve been meaning to set aside time to look at SimpleDB; it feels like the big gap in web-scale is standard/open APIs for structured data storage. EC2 gives you compute (and the API is fairly obvious), and S3 is your big key-value bucket, but until Amazon announced SimpleDB there were really only hacks for clustering MySQL. And that only gets you so far.

Another interesting project in this area is CouchDB.