Didn't I see this on "Silicon Valley"?
Bezos signature edition coming soon
AWS Snowcone
131–140 of 221 posts
Re: AWS Snowcone
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Those are all really good points. I'm interested in hearing more about the NTFS quirks - what kind of issues were cropping up? Now I'm really curious what filesystem Snowball wound up standardizing on, and how/if file metadata/ACLs/alternate data streams are maintained.
I helped a client do a transfer to S3 via snowball once for a music studio client with a smorgusboard of random hard drives.
The software client for doing the transfer is some sort of command line JVM tool from my memory. You locally create S3 buckets on the snowball and copy from the local disks into the buckets.
Once the snowball is returned, the buckets appear in your online account.
Re: AWS Snowcone
#133Anyone know what the FCC ID is? I would love to see the FCC application teardown but can't find the FCC ID anywhere.
I doubt it has it's own FCC ID. It probably uses an off the shelf wifi card to avoid having to do FCC testing.
Re: AWS Snowcone
#134I 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…
Doesn't solve
* Drives would get damaged during shipping.
* Stuff would go missing in shipping.
Re: AWS Snowcone
#135The 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.
That's a cool idea. I wonder how many re-uses a box like that would take to make it cost effective over the same amount of cardboard. Should be feasible I'd think.
If the cost to return the box is more than a cardboard box, its not feasible.
Re: AWS Snowcone
#136Something related from my previous job, for data storage there's Serverpack 35 from Acromove. 120 TB per box, suitcase form factor, includes tracking and remote control. You seal it and you load it in courier car.
https://acromove.com/products/serverpack-35/
They also have Serverpack Edge which is supposed to do the same.
Re: AWS Snowcone
#137Earlier 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.
Thanks for the heads up! I'll notify the team.
You can learn more here: https://www.digitalglobe.com/products/gbdx
Re: AWS Snowcone
#138Earlier 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-...
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."
Or these days, micro flash cards.
Re: AWS Snowcone
#139I 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…
When you realize that your data is going to take 24 months to copy elsewhere (e.g., the cloud or another DC) over the fastest link you have, you have a real need for something like this.
Re: AWS Snowcone
#140I 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 imagine if you're already integrated into the AWS ecosystem, there's a convenience in treating your on-premise node as "just another node". You can run EC2 instances on it, and manage it using the same tools. But with better latency and more robust local connectivity due to the proximity.
The ability to build AMIs and run them on Snowcones gives you the power to build applications that do all sorts of interesting filtering, pre-processing, and analysis at the edge.
To me the product feels like snakeoil and I'm skeptical it will take off in a big way, but I think more than enough customers will use it to justify their investment.
Remember, AWS is selling a platform. The more claws they can sink into their customers, the harder it is for them to switch to a competing one.