Somewhat lost in the greater story of Amazon Web Services’ new DynamoDB NoSQL database is that the new service runs atop a solid-state storage system. However, by abstracting those SSDs underneath a higher-level application service, AWS has once again demonstrated its cloud wisdom by illustrating how new hardware presents greater opportunities than Infrastructure-as-a-Service alone.

AWS doing solid-state drives is a big deal in the world of cloud computing, where users have been wondering for years when the company might start offering SSDs as a service. Other cloud providers already offer bare SSDs as a service, and more certainly are thinking about it with the advent of companies such as SolidFire that are specifically targeting cloud providers with solid-state arrays. The idea is that they’ll be necessary to run I/O-intensive applications such as databases and ERP, which many large organizations consider mission-critical but which many cloud providers aren’t yet equipped to handle.