We’ve been doing some exploration of Jake’s Thrudb project as an alternative to cramming document-oriented blobs into a database. Thrudb is built on top of Facebook’s Thrift framework and is designed to provide document storage and indexing. It’ is also an alternative to Amazon’s recently announced SimpleDB which Jake has provided some commentary on.

Thrudb is targeted towards Amazon’s EC2 infrastructure. Unfortunately getting an EC2 instance with Thrift, Thrudb, memcached, Spread and CLucene configured, built and deployed is quite a time investment for someone casually exploring Thrudb. As a result, and to thank Jake for all his support along the way, we’re making two EC2 public images available. Both are ready to go for those interested in checking out Thrudb.

If you plan on using the 32-bit, small or using Starbucks nomenclature “Tall” Amazon EC2 instance you’ll want to use ami-e926c380. If you want to run the “Grande” or “Venti” instances, you’ll need the 64-bit version: ami-1626c37f . Both images are CentOS based.

You’ll also probably want to read the Thrudb Technical Document and then check out the tutorial which is available in Ruby, Perl, PHP and Java.

Enjoy and thanks again Jake!