Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Amazon Snowball

aws.amazon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 202 posts

Re: Amazon Snowball

#121

Post by MichaelGG »

driverdan wrote: post #85

This has interesting security implications for both sides. Is the device 100% offline or does it phone home when you connect it to your network or transmit any other data? What if someone gets the device and hacks it to scan Amazon's networks when sent back?

I'm gonna guess they have all sorts of physical tamper detection capabilities to prevent this. And perhaps a software load that gets wiped every time, so in case you find a bug in their software (iSCSI? NFS? whatever) it might be hard to escalate.

Re: Amazon Snowball

#122

Post by rgbrenner »

miraswitch wrote: post #120
rgbrenner wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Careful. My previous startup was a storage company that competed with Amazon and Google when they were charging 0.10/gb and I calculated it should be around 0.02/gb. A few months after launch, they both realized it too and dropped their prices. Leads dried up overnight. The high prices seem to persist until one day they don't.

Yea, we considered this - but if Amazon and Google compete with us I'll consider it a personal success :)

They compete against you whether they know you exist or not because your customers/prospects know Amazon/Google/etc exists.

It only takes one of the large players to break the pricing stalemate, and overnight they'll all follow to keep their position in the market.

Re: Amazon Snowball

#123

Post by jeffbarr »

teraflop wrote: post #70
utrex wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

teraflop was right, it's $200 per snowball device job, which is currently limited to 50TB. Maybe that will change. You can order multiple jobs to import more data. You have 10 days to complete the transfer and ship it back and then it's $15 a day. $200 buys you 50TB per job, great encryption, and speedy migration. Sources: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-importexport-snowball-t... and https://aws.amazon.com/impo…

After reading those pages, I think you're wrong, and the $200 is actually per-device. For one thing, the documentation says you can use multiple Snowball devices, but carefully tiptoes around saying whether or not there's an extra charge for doing so. All of the language that actually talks about pricing just says "the device", singular. For another thing, the screenshots of the "create a job" workflow are missing an…

You can request multiple devices at once. I didn't include that screen in the blog post.

Re: Amazon Snowball

#124

Post by genericpseudo »

wanderfowl wrote: post #8
jonkiddy wrote: post #6

An AWS version of a sneakernet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet

Yep, all I could think was "Wow, that's a good deal fancier than a station wagon full of tapes". Cloud backup companies have had similar services for a while now, but it's nice to see AWS adopting it.

There was already a service where you could mail AWS removable hard disks and have them load it into S3 for you.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/send-us-that-data/

Re: Amazon Snowball

#125

Post by chrismarlow9 »

jonknee wrote: post #106
chrismarlow9 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't bother, AWS defenders will continue to defend it and replace employees with a larger AWS bill and further lockin until they shoot themselves in the foot.

A large AWS bill (which actually gets cheaper over time!) is much easier/cheaper to get rid of than employees. AWS also won't get recruited by a competitor and come into your office wanting a ton more money.

AWS is the employee that sits there and learns the industry and every inch of the system you have for 5 years, and then one day you wake up and they're not at work. You read the news that morning and they just got 50 million to do their version of your company, and way better than yours.

Or they start getting older, don't keep the skills sharp enough, and die off. Now you've got to painfully convince them to help you train a new employee to keep the show running, or pay 10 fold your savings hiring the smartest in the world to fix it. But the systems too big, and by the time it's on the "latest and most popular cloud architecture with proprietary systems", you're irrelevant.

But you're right, they make the companies current CEO/CTO look good by cutting costs in the beginning, so who cares right?

Re: Amazon Snowball

#126

Post by gamegoblin »

ck2 wrote: post #108

the E Ink shipping label will automatically update Are you kidding me? Instead of a 25 cent shipping label they use a $100 e-ink display? The display alone might get the device stolen.

They mentioned in the keynote they are using a kindle as the display; given that Amazon sells refurbished kindles for $65, I imagine the actual cost is a good bit lower. They also mentioned that the kindle also functions as the user-interface, so it's more than a glorified shipping label.

Re: Amazon Snowball

#127

Post by buro9 »

karlkatzke wrote: post #83
buro9 wrote: post #58

Well, that's an unfortunate name. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=snowball Reminiscent of when Microsoft called an overlay dialog a "floater" and all the South Africans and Brits in the room started laughing. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=floater (the 2nd definition)

I really don't think there's a word that doesn't mean /something/ dirty in some part of the world.

They could've called it what most people think it is: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=sneakernet

No commonly understood dirty version of that, and I suspect most people would've thought it a very cool name as well as appropriate.

Re: Amazon Snowball

#129

Post by balls187 »

chrismarlow9 wrote: post #125
jonknee wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A large AWS bill (which actually gets cheaper over time!) is much easier/cheaper to get rid of than employees. AWS also won't get recruited by a competitor and come into your office wanting a ton more money.

AWS is the employee that sits there and learns the industry and every inch of the system you have for 5 years, and then one day you wake up and they're not at work. You read the news that morning and they just got 50 million to do their version of your company, and way better than yours. Or they start getting older, don't keep the skills sharp enough, and die off. Now you've got to painfully convince them to help you…

Hasn't really impacted Netflix and pretty much every other customer using AWS.

Re: Amazon Snowball

#130

Post by balls187 »

ck2 wrote: post #108

the E Ink shipping label will automatically update Are you kidding me? Instead of a 25 cent shipping label they use a $100 e-ink display? The display alone might get the device stolen.

Tearing apart the system would yield significantly more valuable hardware than just the kindle.
Post reply on HN