From InfoWorld: Nobody thinks of directory services like LDAP or Active Directory as fonts of innovation. But to Amazon, they are a starting point for building something new.
A new public offering from Amazon called Cloud Directory aims to take the ho-hum idea behind a directory service—a hierarchical database—and endow it with features that make it useful to a far wider range of applications.
Cloud Directory is essentially a hierarchical database designed to allow the data stored inside to be seen via multiple hierarchies. Amazon cites as an example a company org chart that can be navigated in multiple ways, such as by geography or reporting structure.
Many of Cloud Directory’s behaviors are designed around the idea that multiple applications need to work elegantly with a given database. Cloud Directory’s schema is extensible, in the manner of a NoSQL database. But applications can define their own private schema extensions, so that any attributes they add aren’t seen by other apps and won’t unintentionally gum up their works.
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