Like-for-Like SimpleDB Offline

We are currently using Amazon's SimpleDB for a web service. The data is very simple and doesn't require anything like SQL. Its basically a 'property bag'.

We are due to demo our project somewhere where 开发者_运维知识库we will not definitely have Internet access and thus may not be able to access SimpleDB. This has only just become apparent and I have been asked to look for service that we can run on a local server that would provide us with a like-for-like (i.e. calls to SimpleDB would work the same on this service) so that we could just direct our code to this rather than the real AWS SimpleDB service without any code change.

Is anyone else doing something similar? What are you using?

We also use Azure, so rather than change our app to work with one service online and another offline, we may change it to only use Azure as this can be run offline and still work.

Windows Azure table storage does not really work offline per se. The storage emulator can be run without an internent connection. However, it is an emulator. So, it does not have 100% fidelity with the cloud service and it is not tuned for any type of performance comparison. You could use this for demos, but I would not suggest using the emulator for any type of 'real' work. Crazy thing about cloud services... they don't work very well offline. ;)

You could maybe use a local version of redis - http://redis.io/ - but this definitely would require some recoding - not like-for-like calls

If the application was written to be testable (meaning you are using something like the repository pattern) you could possibly stub the calls and point to either a very lite Db or a file.

As a reference for anyone who ends up here looking for the same...

We eventually used mdb/node.js which uses the same api calls as SimpleDB. All we had to do was point our app at a new Service Endpoint URL (our MDB Node.js server - which was handily a VMware application that we ran in VMware Player).

This worked perfectly, but thankfully we never actually needed it as we could access the real SimpleDB.

https://github.com/robtweed/node-mdb

http://gradvs1.mgateway.com/main/index.html?path=mdb

Neil