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AWS Snowcone

aws.amazon.com

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Re: AWS Snowcone

#21

Post by akersten »

This must be where all the traded-in Kindle screens are going. I was surprised Amazon was willing to pay me $25 for my 7-year-old Kindle, but I guess it's cheaper than manufacturing new eInk displays.

Maybe I'm a germophobe, but isn't it kind of gross that this thing is shipped in no container and then put on your desk?

Re: AWS Snowcone

#22

Post by Gaelan »

aketchum wrote: post #13

I must not interact with big enough data to understand, but what is the point of this? I have watched/read several of the Snow product descriptions from AWS and I am still not quite sure I understand the point. It seems like a way to sync local big data to AWS cloud storage for data that is too large to realistically transfer via the internet. So is this simply a sneakernet external harddrive because physically shipp…

I don't get this one, but for the larger Snow products, yeah, it's for transferring data too large to realistically sending over the internet.

Re: AWS Snowcone

#23

Post by t0mas88 »

Interesting at the very least for retrieval of backups from S3 Deep Glacier. Because the Glacier retrieval fees with bulk transfer are only 0.003 (yes 0.3 cent, not 3 cent) per GB. The thing that kills the backup use-case is $ 0.09 per GB bandwidth costs to the internet. The Snowcone brings that down to $ ~0.037 + shipping if you use the full 8TB per device.

And that includes a $ 0.03 bandwidth fee from S3 tot Snowcone that I guess they're going to reduce over time since it's all on their internal network.

Re: AWS Snowcone

#24

Post by yingw787 »

This is nice! I want a homelab for my data, but I like AWS. It'd be cool to run my own personal database on this, and only run pg_backup to S3. RDS is too expensive for personal projects, but I'm not sure if free Heroku dynos and such aren't enough for raw data processing. So yeah, I guess if AWS had tiny RDS with primary node as Snowcone, I'd buy one. Otherwise I might buy one later and install my own database on it.

Not sure where AWS is going with this, but I'd like to see AWS offer a tiny version of AWS Outposts, where you can get any kind of AWS service in a box.

Re: AWS Snowcone

#26

Post by McTossOut »

jackklika wrote: post #7

I think that local storage of personal data ("data most important to you") will be a huge trend in the next few years for both homes and offices, especially if they can back up data to other trusted devices (in other homes and offices of trusted people). As always the problem is going to be usability - the AWS ecosystem is not friendly to non-techies.

I am in firm agreement here. I'd hope that it would fall to Ethereum network since that's the infrastructure it provides. The ecosystem is growing with tools like Metamask that makes it adoptable, failing some serious gaffe things might swing that way. There's a way to go though, to making information security transparent -- how a communal cloud would maintain availability of your data, but the costs to have a modern datacenter cloud provider store a fingernail of data are a bit out of line.

Re: AWS Snowcone

#27

Post by jrockway »

I have no opinion on the necessity of this product (sucks that 100Gbps networks are still confined to datacenters), but did they reuse a backlight Kindle display for the screen that becomes the shipping label? That's neat, I love it when people take advantage of things other parts of their company did.

Re: AWS Snowcone

#28

Post by txcwpalpha »

aketchum wrote: post #13

I must not interact with big enough data to understand, but what is the point of this? I have watched/read several of the Snow product descriptions from AWS and I am still not quite sure I understand the point. It seems like a way to sync local big data to AWS cloud storage for data that is too large to realistically transfer via the internet. So is this simply a sneakernet external harddrive because physically shipp…

I'm with you. I think this is really cool but I have a hard time finding a use case for it.

The use case for the other Snow products (Snowball, Snowmobile) are clearer, as they are for transferring petabytes of data to/from AWS without having to use slow internet connections. Snowcone could be used for this indeed, but at only 8 TB, the value proposition seems a lot less. Personally, I'd probably just suffer through having to spend a week doing a slow internet upload/download rather than paying for Snowcone.

Also, the articles talks multiple times about using Snowcone to upload the data for you, over your own internet connection. Why would I pay for Snowcone to do that when I could just upload directly to S3, without using Snowcone as the middle layer, and get the same speeds?

The compute aspect of it seems cool from a "im a tech enthusiast and this is cool" perspective, similar to how a Raspberry Pi is cool, but I don't see the real-world use case for hosting compute workloads on a rented Raspberry Pi. I would just buy a Raspberry Pi instead for cheaper.

What this does make me interested in is something like this, but purchaseable outright without renting, a la AWS Outposts but the size of the Snowcone. It would be cool to have a swarm of Raspberry Pi sized devices that I controlled entirely through the AWS console with AWS services, and it would open up some niche use cases like having a tiny server cluster in places where I otherwise wouldn't have infrastructure, like a remote research camp or rural community.

Re: AWS Snowcone

#29

Post by ajsharp »

aketchum wrote: post #13

I must not interact with big enough data to understand, but what is the point of this? I have watched/read several of the Snow product descriptions from AWS and I am still not quite sure I understand the point. It seems like a way to sync local big data to AWS cloud storage for data that is too large to realistically transfer via the internet. So is this simply a sneakernet external harddrive because physically shipp…

So yea, pretty much. I had to do this with a project from a couple years ago where we were moving a ton of images from a legacy colo'd server to S3. I can't remember how much data it was but it was enough to where it didn't make sense and would've taken for-fucking-ever to move it to S3 over public internet.

When we did it, we bought a drive, went to the colo, offloaded the files, and you have to do some stuff to kick off a job to let them know you're sending a drive and what kind and all that sort of thing. Then you mail it to them and they run an import into an bucket.

My guess with these drives is controlling the hardware makes the process significantly more efficient for them, and for the enterprise customers they're trying to move off colo and onto AWS.

Re: AWS Snowcone

#30

Post by t0mas88 »

aketchum wrote: post #13

I must not interact with big enough data to understand, but what is the point of this? I have watched/read several of the Snow product descriptions from AWS and I am still not quite sure I understand the point. It seems like a way to sync local big data to AWS cloud storage for data that is too large to realistically transfer via the internet. So is this simply a sneakernet external harddrive because physically shipp…

The speed is questionable in many countries where consumer internet connections already have 500mbit upload speed. But in the US I think bandwidth can be quite limited if you're not in a major city with fiber.

The other big part is pricing. AWS charges $ 0.09 per GB for outbound transfer, so getting 8 TB of data out of AWS via the internet costs over $ 700. Doing it through Snowcone costs around $ 300 + shipping.

Reasonable use-case would be transferring video material or high resolution sensor data.

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