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AWS Snowcone

aws.amazon.com

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Re: AWS Snowcone

#201

Post by bufferoverflow »

firloop wrote: post #150
ThisIsTheWay wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For real! Reminds me of this article... "A carrier pigeon with a cargo of microSD cards can transfer large amounts of data faster, and more cheaply, than just about any other method" Link: https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/computing/networks/pigeo...

This almost got me and then I looked at the date of publication.

It's still true. A pigeon can easily carry 10 microSD cards, 1TB each. Even if you're on a gigabit connection, it will take you over 22 hours to copy 10TB.

Re: AWS Snowcone

#202

Post by jon-wood »

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…

> 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.

You’re looking for Greengrass, which is hidden away in the IoT tooling AWS provide. It allows you to run Lambda functions and Docker containers on Raspberry Pi (and smaller) sized devices, controlled entirely through the AWS console.

Re: AWS Snowcone

#203

Post by jon-wood »

wmf wrote: post #35
ceejayoz wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They have a pricing example for this use case which includes the following caveat:

> First, you should contact AWS Sales to discuss private pricing for the long-term AWS Snowcone deployment

Re: AWS Snowcone

#204

Post by jon-wood »

pmorici wrote: post #68

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?

It’s a trade off between speed and security, and my assumption is that they’ve chosen to do it this way so that the encryption key isn’t sitting on the device during transit. By doing it this way even if someone can intercept data while it’s being shipped between the customer and AWS all they’re going to get is a disk full of random bytes.

Re: AWS Snowcone

#205

Post by PedroBatista »

tener wrote: post #199
ies7 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a sense of the world, I went to Manila in 2018 to find out why there are several distributor can only sent their data weekly. One of the distributor show me a 64 MB usb flashdisk that’s travelled every week with the delivery truck to get 4 MB of data from their branches (8 hours truck driving from the capital) Went to Myanmar in 2017. The nation is just upgrading to 4G in 2016. But not every places have 4G covera…

Why not satellite internet then?

$$$

Re: AWS Snowcone

#206

Post by master-litty »

noisy_boy wrote: post #197
icelancer wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They tried reusable plastic boxes for Amazon stuff in Seattle years ago. It was a pretty colossal failure. People just kept the plastic boxes and used them for stuff around the house. "Bill the people who keep the plastic boxes," is the oft-heard refrain! What if they're stolen off your porch due to living in a not-great neighborhood? You still owe?

Bill upfront and credit back on return. Amazon shouldn't be responsible for the stealing happening in your neighbourhood.

They often shoulder that responsibility to reduce friction, and I think it works net-positive in their favor.

Billing the customer and then penalizing them for being a victim of theft introduces so much friction and frustration.

Re: AWS Snowcone

#207

Post by Corrado »

Frost1x wrote: post #40
jrockway wrote: post #27

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.

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.

I'm guessing that shipping companies have some procedures in place today for dealing with packages with damaged labels. Even paper labels can be ripped, scarred, or otherwise damaged beyond a readable state.

Re: AWS Snowcone

#208

Post by joncrane »

thayne wrote: post #198
mrtweetyhack wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't solve * Drives would get damaged during shipping. * Stuff would go missing in shipping.

sure it does. the drives are specifically designed to be rugged enough to handle transportation (and are tamper resistant and tamper evident), and I imagine amazon probably uses their own delivery network to transport it, which means if it is lost in shipping, it is amazon's fault (and presumable can be corrected). It also wouldn't surprise me if at least some of the product contain GPS to make it less likely to get…

Pretty sure the E-Ink on the snowball devices are set up for UPS tracking label format.

Re: AWS Snowcone

#209

Post by noisy_boy »

master-litty wrote: post #206
noisy_boy wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bill upfront and credit back on return. Amazon shouldn't be responsible for the stealing happening in your neighbourhood.

They often shoulder that responsibility to reduce friction, and I think it works net-positive in their favor. Billing the customer and then penalizing them for being a victim of theft introduces so much friction and frustration.

That is true and besides the point which is that they are not responsible.

Re: AWS Snowcone

#210

Post by sanguy »

shawn-butler wrote: post #116
ThisIsTheWay wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-...

Just FYI your company has a cert mismatch on the following link from that blog post: https://platform.digitalglobe.com/gbdx/ The cert is limited to *.wpengine.com And the link 404s so.. that's a shame. Was interested in learning more about the platform.

Like everything from DigitalGlobe -- it doesn't work.
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