The 21st century's pneumatic tube!
AWS Snowcone
81–90 of 221 posts
Re: AWS Snowcone
#82Hey 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.
Answered my own question! Thanks for posting! Has some cool applications for sure, but too much draw for set it and forget type of operations.
On behalf of future searchers trying to avoid the "nvm I figured it out" problem, what was the answer?
Re: AWS Snowcone
#83This 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?
I think in the typical use case it's going somewhere that's equally dirty or worse, but if not, I believe it is water resistant and can be washed with a soapy sponge.
Re: AWS Snowcone
#84I 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…
One use case I know of is in a mining operation. They collect a ton of data about their equipment and their mines as they work, but they are often out in very desolate areas with no internet.
The mining equipment runs greengrass right on the machine to do real time inference to help make mining more efficient as well as flag potential equipment failure to the operator.
So they would strap this device onto the equipment, it would collect data and do inference, and then they can swap it out for a new one and send the old one back so the data can be added to their data lake to update all of the AI models.
Re: AWS Snowcone
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
A residential cable connection realistically offers something like 25Mbps down/3Mbps up. That's 246 days to upload 8TB!
According to Speedtest.net [0], the average US internet speed is 138Mbps down/51Mbps up. That's certainly not amazing, but on average that's only ~2 weeks to upload 8 TB. I can certainly see where this makes more sense if you're below that average, though. 0: https://www.speedtest.net/global-index/united-states#fixed
I would add the standard caution when looking at averages, that symmetric 1/1 fiber may be pulling the upload value up significantly. Or that Speedtest users have higher internet speeds.
But I really want that stat to be true. The world of American ISPs is sad and depressing.
Re: AWS Snowcone
#86Hey 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.
My team also may be looking for something with similar requirements in the near future, do you have any recommendations for solutions that you're considering? I know a number of earth science researchers that have mentioned ideas that would really benefit from that sort thing as well.
Re: AWS Snowcone
#87Anyone know what the FCC ID is? I would love to see the FCC application teardown but can't find the FCC ID anywhere.
Re: AWS Snowcone
#88I'm not sure whether I'm more annoyed by AWS' product naming scheme or the JS/Ruby/etc community's cutsy project names
Re: AWS Snowcone
#89I 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 can speak to part of the rationality around Snowball: The old method of customers sending in hard disks and AWS importing them turned out to be _incredibly_ high touch. * Customers would put the wrong labels on the wrong drives. Given they were encrypted, and the label details were critical to matching the right disk with the right encryption key, that was a big issue. * Imports would routinely fail due to all sort…
great examples of why to use this over "just" a large external hard drive in a case. Thanks for the insight!
Re: AWS Snowcone
#90I 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. Rea…
It never ceases to amaze me that people pay that much for transfer. It's one tenth the price on DigitalOcean and it isn't like this is comparing two different types of things.