AWS Snowcone pricing here: https://aws.amazon.com/snowcone/pricing/
It's definitely not cheap. As always with AWS.
AWS Snowcone
31–40 of 221 posts
Re: AWS Snowcone
#32I 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…
When talking about petabytes of data is definitely faster to physically offload the data, ship it, and physically load it on an edge location.
Regarding the size of the data. Well, yes. There are companies with petabytes of data. Banking is one example that comes to my mind when thinking about petabytes scale data.
Re: AWS Snowcone
#33Sort of EC2/EBS in a local NAS device? Interesting.
Re: AWS Snowcone
#34I 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…
For upload it doesn't make much sense. For download it's less than half the cost compared to AWS outbound bandwidth to the internet.
Re: AWS Snowcone
#35Is this the beginning of mini self-hosted clouds where the orchestration happens in a web UI but the compute/storage is local? Like a cheap version of Azure Stack? I get that you can’t keep the snowcone, but if you could, it would be a little VM host with local storage on your LAN that could let you run everything internal.
It looks like you can keep the Snowcone. One of the screenshots offers this option: > "Perform local compute and storage workloads, without transferring data. You can order multiple devices in a cluster for increased durability and storage capacity."
At $6/day it's fairly expensive for non-temporary workloads.
Re: AWS Snowcone
#36I 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 would assume that this would be for gathering information from remote data collection nodes or from computers that don't access networks. Instead of hooking up with a laptop and some kind of portable NAS, you could connect a snow product to slurp up the data and then mail it to Amazon to upload. I think their selling point is the reliability of the snow family, and not having to worry about the data after the initial upload which can be super critical for some business models.
Re: AWS Snowcone
#37I'd love to see an "expedited import" option for this, where the device gets shipped to an AWS facility right near the carrier overnight hub and imported into S3 that night, landing in S3 by ~2am and able to be processed and delivered to customers before they get to work the next morning.
For many remote data collection activities this could remove the need for expensive and long lead fiber installation.
Re: AWS Snowcone
#38This 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…
My thoughts exactly. Seems like a great way to have a local DynamoDB for the team to collaborate with. I wonder how strong the sync to cloud story is.
Re: AWS Snowcone
#39I 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…
> Hardware failures on amazon.
“Someone else’s problem”
That’s what you’re paying for on any cloud provider. Any hardware problem isn’t your problem and it (should be) abstracted away.
Re: AWS Snowcone
#40I 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.
That's the part that I thought was truly creative.
What happens when the eink display is damaged or stops working during shipping though? I'm presuming if dynamic shipping labels like this ever become common, shipping companies will need their own independent identifier or a standardized physical identifier they can use to pull up shipping information from should such a case occur.