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AWS Tape Gateway

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Re: AWS Tape Gateway

#131

Post by iLoveOncall »

Aeolun wrote: post #122
iLoveOncall wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's weird how it's always the people that talk about friends that worked there but don't actually work there themselves that are usually the only ones to have negative things to tell. I've been there 5 years, haven't worked more than 40 hours a week ever, and a lot of the people that started at the same time as me are in the same situation. And of those that aren't, they left because they wanted new experiences, not…

We had a colleague moving to AWS, but he came running back within a year :P It can’t be all bad, but it’s clearly not all good either. It kind of makes sense that the people still there wouldn’t have bad stories to tell. What do you think is the worst part about working for Amazon?

A lot of the people I've seen leave within a year or two that didn't go work for better companies were actually fired.

It's relatively common that people don't make the cut during their probation period for example. Amazon (and other FAANGs) clearly isn't for everyone.

So I would question anyone that takes the easiest job they can find (their old job) after leaving Amazon in less that a year or two.

Re: AWS Tape Gateway

#132

Post by taamazonsde1234 »

dastbe wrote: post #104
posguy wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon is a turn and burn employer at its heart. I've watched dozens of friends and acquaintances work there, rarely making it past 2 years, only to leave for less caustic organization thereafter. Unless your willing to put up with a huge ration of shit on a regular basis, or you make it into management, your time is limited by the up and out mentality of the organization as a whole. Amazon has created the perfect sc…

I can't really speak to amazon retail, but in my 7 odd years in aws I found most people left because * working in infrastructure means doing a lot not quite so exciting things. most people aren't actually excited by ops, and a lot of your dev work will be on ops. its also the case that ops was historically not as well rewarded, though thats been fixed * every service needs to be held to the highest tier of operationa…

> I can't really speak to amazon retail, but in my 7 odd years in aws I found most people left because

I've worked at Amazon for over 4 years. During this period, I saw around 80% of all team members being promoted to customer, perhaps half of them voluntarily. Amazon provided psychological service to those who felt they needed it, and a couple who quit confided in me they used the service. One guy overtly burned out and never showed up again.

Long work hours were the norm. Plenty of CRs were posted after 10PM. Even SDE3s frequently posted CRs on Sundays. The senior manager was hell bent on proving leadership he could deliver projects in impossible deadlines and not rarely did he warned SDEs that failing to deliver on those promises were firable offenses. This in turn fostered a work environment that led to some backstabbing and less than ethical stunts from team members prone to those and desperate to make a good impression.

It's true that Amazon's salary structure is designed to push out people. It is designed to impose a hefty pay cut after the second year or so. Nevertheless this is not the problem. The problem is the awful corporate culture that's designed to hold SDEs responsible for not delivering things even in impossible scenarios, and the backstabbing culture it sprouts by design.

But I'm sure some people might have a good time working there.

Re: AWS Tape Gateway

#133

Post by thedougd »

logifail wrote: post #78
kube-system wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS's hard disks are a physical thing that is offsite

> AWS's hard disks are a physical thing that is offsite Taking tapes to a secure offsite location means they're air-gapped from the source data, so even in a situation where an entire network is compromised, remotely-stored tapes can't be wiped/encrypted. I'm sure AWS has thought about this issue while designing Tape Gateway, but it's not clear to me how it could know whether a request to retrieve and overwrite a vir…

Tape Gateway is just a gateway to S3.

S3 offers WORM (Write Once Read Many) storage with Glacier and Object Lock. The slow retrieval for Glacier hints that AWS isn't using hard disks.

Re: AWS Tape Gateway

#134

Post by glasss »

jedberg wrote: post #47
glasss wrote: post #10

My first and only experience with tape backups was in 2014 working with the BBB of Chicago. They were using tape backups, and there I learned that almost no company that small should be using tapes. Unless you have one or two people dedicated to handling that plus whatever other backup solutions you have in place, it won't end well.

Interesting. I wonder if tapes got more complicated or if everything else just got easier. The last time I dealt with tapes was in the 1990s, and it was dead simple. We used tape backups at a company with only 150 people. I was the most junior admin so I had to be the tape monkey, but it was easy. Just run backups regularly, change the tape every couple of days and label it, ship a stack to the offsite storage and re…

Everything else was definitely easier by comparison, but the situation was more about the one internal guy responsible for it was also doing all of the normal IT dept functions, so being the tape monkey was at the bottom of the list - for better or worse.

When you're juggling 12 plates, a couple are gonna fall.

Re: AWS Tape Gateway

#135

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

pmw wrote: post #77
WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Once you have massive data in AWS there is no efficient and affordable solution to move that data back out; you are locked in forever subject to whatever future terms Amazon may chose to impose. You can have your shit packed into a snowball and shipped to you.

But you pay the same egress rate.

There's no egress for snowball, you just pay snowball pricing.

Re: AWS Tape Gateway

#136

Post by fbdab103 »

ufmace wrote: post #116
robocat wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Transfer up to 100 PB per Snowmobile, a 45-foot-long ruggedized shipping container pulled by a semi-trailer truck.” - I’m guessing usually used to migrate corporate information into AWS, but can also be used for data export. They advertise Exabytes (using more than one rig I guess). https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/

I wonder if they haven't updated that in a while, it sounds low. You can get 22TB 3.5" hard drives these days. If I take that storage and figure full racks with rackmount NASes I get 30 feet long for 1 row of full-size racks. 45 feet is longer and they probably have room for at least 2 rows. Even accounting for probably needing some controller computers and routers and network interfaces and such, I would think they…

Surely for hardware being lugged around on the back of a truck, potentially exposed to whatever heat, humidity, vibration, etc - redundancy becomes a vital component of the design. I would expect at least 2-3x replication for every byte written. Depending on how sealed the container is, they may not want to physically extricate failed drives and merely mark them as unavailable for use.

Re: AWS Tape Gateway

#137

Post by xboxnolifes »

iamtedd wrote: post #97
capableweb wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. If it says "Virtual machines" and it isn't, you wouldn't call that at least misleading?

I think you're misunderstanding the scenario. What if each 'virtual' machine is actually bare metal i.e.: every EC2 instance is actually a separate computer? There's still isolation, there's just no virtualisation abstraction.

What if your goal was to test virtual machine feature and performance parity to real machine?

Is that not misleading?

Re: AWS Tape Gateway

#138

Post by yencabulator »

jedberg wrote: post #47
glasss wrote: post #10

My first and only experience with tape backups was in 2014 working with the BBB of Chicago. They were using tape backups, and there I learned that almost no company that small should be using tapes. Unless you have one or two people dedicated to handling that plus whatever other backup solutions you have in place, it won't end well.

Interesting. I wonder if tapes got more complicated or if everything else just got easier. The last time I dealt with tapes was in the 1990s, and it was dead simple. We used tape backups at a company with only 150 people. I was the most junior admin so I had to be the tape monkey, but it was easy. Just run backups regularly, change the tape every couple of days and label it, ship a stack to the offsite storage and re…

> I wonder if tapes got more complicated or if everything else just got easier.

Everything else got easier, bigger, and faster.

Two decades back, you needed tape to cost effectively back up hundreds of gigabytes. These days, pretty much unless you have a spare room with an automatic tape library (robots moving tapes), you're too small for tape to make sense.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tape_drive#History

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tape_library

Re: AWS Tape Gateway

#139

Post by dastbe »

taamazonsde1234 wrote: post #132
dastbe wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't really speak to amazon retail, but in my 7 odd years in aws I found most people left because * working in infrastructure means doing a lot not quite so exciting things. most people aren't actually excited by ops, and a lot of your dev work will be on ops. its also the case that ops was historically not as well rewarded, though thats been fixed * every service needs to be held to the highest tier of operationa…

> I can't really speak to amazon retail, but in my 7 odd years in aws I found most people left because I've worked at Amazon for over 4 years. During this period, I saw around 80% of all team members being promoted to customer, perhaps half of them voluntarily. Amazon provided psychological service to those who felt they needed it, and a couple who quit confided in me they used the service. One guy overtly burned out…

not discounting your experience but

> The senior manager was hell bent on proving leadership he could deliver projects in impossible deadlines and not rarely did he warned SDEs that failing to deliver on those promises were firable offenses. This in turn fostered a work environment that led to some backstabbing and less than ethical stunts from team members prone to those and desperate to make a good impression.

is an extreme situation and one I never saw across ~3 orgs between amazon and aws.

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