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AWS Snowcone

aws.amazon.com

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Re: AWS Snowcone

#101

Post by searine »

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've used AWS snowballs fairly frequently and it is definitely a specialty product.

For our use case it was genome sequencing. Each individual genome was a terabyte or so depending on what types of data we sent. We can crank out a few hundred genomes per week at full production so when our collaborators need to receive their data they usually neither have the capacity in bandwidth or storage for cohort of thousands. So it gets shipped to AWS.

We've made improvements to get more direct connections to cloud services so we don't use them anymore but for awhile we were filling a snowball and shipping it every week or two. We also used the Google Transfer Appliance once or twice (480tb) to transfer projects all at once instead of piecemeal.

Re: AWS Snowcone

#102

Post by JshWright »

aapeli wrote: post #98

I wonder if AWS are shooting themselves in the foot (if these things become very popular), by making the "Cloud" a physical, tangible thing. I think part of the lustre for some customers is that they don't know what they're paying for when they start a 2 vCPU EC2 instance and must think it's something crazy complex and special. Now having it on your desk in a tiny little box will make them wonder what they pay so muc…

Throw a red LED on top and it's literally "the internet" from The IT Crowd

Re: AWS Snowcone

#104

Post by amichal »

buzzdenver wrote: post #91
t0mas88 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Can you transfer data out of AWS with Snowcone? I thought it was all transfer in, which is free.

A screenshot in the article implies that you "Export from S3" https://media.amazonwebservices.com/blog/2020/snow_job_type_...

Re: AWS Snowcone

#105

Post by asdfman123 »

Twirrim wrote: post #73
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 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…

It's just sneakernet with bells and whistles. As it should be.

Re: AWS Snowcone

#106

Post by ramraj07 »

ThisIsTheWay wrote: post #69
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-...

What was the premium of storing the data in S3 as opposed to keeping it in your own tape warehouse? Definitely curious about the cost benefits!

Re: AWS Snowcone

#107

Post by binaryblitz »

3pt14159 wrote: post #90
t0mas88 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

DO is incredibly limited in terms of products compared to AWS.

Re: AWS Snowcone

#108

Post by claytoneast »

The e-ink display part triggers thoughts of an Amazon of the future that uses entirely reusable boxes to ship things to consumers. Hard plastic containers w/ e-ink labels. Boom, no more millions (billions? trillions?) of cardboard/plastic boxes used to enclose packages. Still millions/billions/trillions of boxes/plastic packaging for the items themselves, but at least the transit envelope would be reusable.
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