Amazon Web Services’ Cloud Directory product is now generally available in its U.S. East, U.S. West, Australia, Ireland and Singapore regions.

Amazon Cloud Directory is a developer-focused managed service for storing large amounts of strongly typed hierarchical data, the company said. It enables the creation of flexible cloud-native directories for organizing hierarchies of data along multiple dimensions. Using the tool, developers can create directories for a variety of use cases, including course, catalogs, device registries, organizational charts and network configurations. In a blog post, AWS chief evangelist Jeff Barr said Cloud Directory is used to power several of the company’s own services, including AWS Cognito and AWS Organizations.

The company designed Cloud Directory with longevity in mind, noting that traditional, static schemas “lack the flexibility to adapt to the changes that arise with scale and new use cases.” To address this challenge, AWS claims, it has effectively made Cloud Directory future-proof by providing the ability to extend schemas by adding new facets.

In addition, Cloud Directory provides benefits beyond the management and scale advantages that are standard with most cloud-based solutions. For example, Cloud Directory is able to handle both data extension and multiple dimensions safely, Barr said.

“Cognito User Pools use Cloud Directory to offer application-specific user directories with support for user sign-up, sign-in, and multi-factor authentication,” he noted in his post. “With Cognito Your User Pools, you can easily and securely add sign-up and sign-in functionality to your mobile and web apps with a fully managed service that scales to support hundreds of millions of users.”

“Similarly, AWS Organizations uses Cloud Directory to support creation of groups of related AWS accounts and makes good use of multiple hierarchies to enforce a wide range of policies,” he added.

Cloud Directory is designed for fast lookups and retrieval of data that will be “eventually consistent,” the company said. However, the company advises that system administrators using Microsoft’s Active Directory should instead use its older Directory Service product.

Barr said that Cloud Directory is priced according to three factors, namely the amount of data stored, the number of reads and the number of writes. For AWS’s U.S. East region, storage works out at 25 cents per GB per month, while the company charges $0.0040 per 1,000 reads and $0.0043 for every 1,000 writes.

Image courtesy of Amazon Web Services