NuoDB with Amazon S3
Barry Morris here from NuoDB:

You are correct that NuoDB can use S3 as it's primary storage.  In NuoDB terms you are configuring a Storage Manager for S3.

You can have as many other Storage Managers as you want, including others on S3, on a file system somewhere else, or on another supported Key/Value store.

All Storage Managers store the full database redundantly, so loss (or switching off) of Storage Managers will not cause data loss as long as one Storage Manager is still running somewhere in the system.

If you add an empty Storage Manager to a running database it will catch up to the current state of the database before taking part in database activity.  For a very large database this will not be the most efficient way to bring on a new Storage Manager, but it will work.

As relates to backup, you can adopt one of a few different strategies:
a) Do a conventional JDBC/ODBC/SQL level backup.
b) Take a Storage Manager offline, and rely on the fact that we can restart directly from that Storage Manager if needed.
c) Some people will feel that redundant storage in multiple storage managers is good enough and they don't need separate backups.


As for performance on S3 it will be load dependent.  If you want us to give you some estimates then let us know what you are doing and we can estimate it or run some tests for you.