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AWS Snowcone

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Re: AWS Snowcone

#61

Post by pgrote »

gregdunn wrote: post #44
txcwpalpha wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Disclaimer: I work at AWS, totally different team, and had never heard of this product until this announcement. This is 100% my personal opinion and I'm not operating in any official capacity. >Personally, I'd probably just suffer through having to spend a week doing a slow internet upload/download rather than paying for Snowcone. Well, I think there's two things here. 1) A lot of businesses probably won't be willing…

>1) A lot of businesses probably won't be willing to spend a week with reduced internet capacity to upload stuff. Things we as single users might be okay with might not always translate to being a good fit for a business overall.

Perfect for us. We used to ship small amount of data in the scheme of things on external drives to Amazon for long term storage in Glacier. Worked great. That program was dropped and replaced by Snowball.

We tried Snowball and never could get it to work properly in our location. Amazon support couldn't get it to work, either. It was really overblown for what we wanted to, anyway.

Sending over the wire isn't an option for us.

This is a better solution for us as long as the networking issues are resolved and the pricing works out.

Re: AWS Snowcone

#62

Post by IanCal »

txcwpalpha wrote: post #28
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…

> 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?

Most or at least many households in the UK I think max out at my speeds (FTTC) which puts me at about 20Mbps upload. At 2.5 meg/second that's over 4 days per TB if I've done my maths right. 8TB is over a month.

I'm looking at a house where I'd have an upload speed about 1-2Mbps, so well over a month per TB uploaded.

> It would be cool to have a swarm of Raspberry Pi sized devices that I controlled entirely through the AWS console with AWS services,

You used to be able to manage things on opsworks outside of AWS if you installed a client. Maybe you still can do this kind of thing - possibly AWS Systems Manager for non-opsworks things? I get a bit lost in all the services these days and their restrictions.

Re: AWS Snowcone

#63

Post by luhn »

N_A_T_E wrote: post #60

All of this makes sense to me, except I have no idea how they fit 100tb of capacity in a box that small. Aren't HDDs maxing out around 16TB these days? They couldn't fit 6 drives in there.

Not sure where you're seeing 100TB?

> AWS Snowcone weighs 4.5 pounds and includes 8 terabytes of usable storage

Re: AWS Snowcone

#64

Post by duskwuff »

julianeon wrote: post #41
txcwpalpha wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I would guess the real use case is: you considered becoming a Snowmobile customer but that's too heavy-duty and you need something for smaller amounts of data. Or you are a Snowmobile customer but sometimes you don't need to back up the truck for a relatively modest-in-size update. So AWS made this. Now they have an offering for you & everyone like you, that they can pitch to CxO execs, especially those who came from…

AWS already had Snowball available as an intermediate level:

https://aws.amazon.com/snowball/

Re: AWS Snowcone

#65

Post by duskwuff »

est31 wrote: post #54

So you need to have Windows or Mac OS in order to use this? No love for Linux? https://aws.amazon.com/en/snowcone/resources/

If you're on Linux, you're probably perfectly happy to use the `aws` command-line tools. No need for fancy graphics. :)

Re: AWS Snowcone

#66

Post by reaperducer »

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 work in healthcare, sometimes we have to go to places with no internet, and sometimes with no electricity. We gather a lot of HIPAA-protected data. This might be useful for those events.

Sometimes, even when we're in the middle of a big city, there's still no secure or reliable internet connection at the location we've been given, so this might be good for those cases, too.

I'm not on the infrastructure side of things, so I can't say for sure. But I've already forwarded the page to our mobile IT team to make sure they've heard about it.

Edit:

They might also be good for television and movie production. In the early part of this century, rushes were sent from remote filming locations to the studios loaded onto iPods. With everything being 4K and higher now, this might be useful to move those rushes to a cloud location where they can be accessed by multiple people who need to see them in multiple cities.

Re: AWS Snowcone

#67

Post by jackklika »

laurentdc wrote: post #14
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 don't mean to sound snarky but isn't "local storage of personal data" what off the shelf NAS devices (QNAP, Synology, WD..) have been doing for almost two decades? Even the backup thing, last time I tried they all had some pretty simple UI built around a rsync fork

I was thinking more having a "personal cloud" between trusted connected devices at different sites.

Re: AWS Snowcone

#68

Post by pmorici »

Here is what I don't get about this product line. The docs say the encryption is done on the attached workstation. Which means your network transfer speed is going to be limited if you don't have a pretty high end machine with at least AESNI. What is the point of having the processor and all that in the device itself if you end up needing a high end workstation anyways to get the maximum performance out of the thing?

Re: AWS Snowcone

#69

Post by ThisIsTheWay »

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…

For a sense of scale, my company used an AWS Snowmobile to transfer 100PB of archived satellite imagery to AWS.

More details here: https://blog.maxar.com/earth-intelligence/2017/digitalglobe-...

Re: AWS Snowcone

#70

Post by ryanisnan »

Hey Jeff, curious what the battery life of this device is?

I'm on a team that has a need for remote compute power, but getting to our devices on anything more frequent than a monthly basis is sometimes a challenge.

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