Named after the horse in Animal Farm?
Amazon Snowball
141–150 of 202 posts
Re: Amazon Snowball
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really don't think there's a word that doesn't mean /something/ dirty in some part of the world.
Yeah, but this is a bit like calling it Amazon Cumswapper. There's no other valid technical use of the word.
My first connection was "Snowball's chance in hell".
Re: Amazon Snowball
#143This 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?
Most likely, they'll get the same results as if they were scanning from an EC2 machine. I doubt Amazon would put it in a trusted (V)LAN.
But the end user probably trusts the machine 99%, so what if you load it with something malicious, send it back to Amazon and wait for it to be sent to another customer and thus hack their network? That is if Amazon does not completely wipe their drives (Hide it somehow?).
Re: Amazon Snowball
#144An AWS version of a sneakernet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet
They referenced this concept before introducing the product.
Re: Amazon Snowball
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
3 cents/GB is cheap . Go 1 cent a GB S3's infrequent access class (since you won't be incurring the charge for retrieval through S3, you'll be pulling back out through Snowball), and its even cheaper. $10/TB/month? Where else can I store data reliably that cheap? (Yes, Backblaze is half that price. I hope they become a worthy adversary to AWS S3 to drive prices further down).
If it cost you about $1000 to buy a diskpack (4*6TB drives) you could create backups and send them to at least a half dozen locations for less money than using S3 to store that data. Yes, S3 is cheap(ish). But given Snowball is a snapshot backup service, it's not comparatively cheaper than it would be to distribute that same data by creating a clone and sending it to a safe place.
If you are just using it for backup, you wouldn't use S3. You'd use Glacier.
What this offers is a useful way to get TBs of data up to Amazon easily, cheaply, and quickly.
Re: Amazon Snowball
#146The e-ink display showing a shipping label is brilliant.
An AWS service with free shipping and a Kindle glued on. It's the ultimate synergy for Amazon.
Re: Amazon Snowball
#147As usual, the pricing is not very friendly, and apparently designed to lock your data into AWS or exploit your weak negotiating position once you buy in. While you can send in 50TB for $200, taking the same 50TB out costs an additional $1500 charge (50000 * 0.03). [assuming they are not transferring the data over the Internet, the cost to AWS should be the same or cheaper for reading]
i.e. Snowball is the price model of AWS.
Re: Amazon Snowball
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
Weird - something about the form factor makes me want to violently toss it off a loading dock. Anyone know how much that would translate to in Gs? (The article says it will survive 6 Gs of shock.)
A whole lot. It depends on how fast it is going. See http://measurespeed.com/deceleration-calculator.php for a quick-and-dirty overview. Gravity accelerates at at 9.8m/s², so if it fell for one second before impacting the ground, and took (for instance) 0.05 seconds to deform before coming to a halt, it'd have experienced 8.91 Gs of shock.
One second is a long time. That's a drop of 16 feet?
Re: Amazon Snowball
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hasn't really impacted Netflix and pretty much every other customer using AWS.
For now. If you want to see the future have a look at the debacle that just went on with prime/appletv/google. If they get a strong enough dominance they will. Given that the IoT is a rising thing, and Amazon is placing itself at the apex of the internets backbone and already has a strangle on the physical goods world, it should be easy to see the next 10 years if it continues. I can see the pitch now... imagine... a…
AWS is already dominant, it's not even close between AWS and the next Cloud platform. Vendor Lock-in is a forgone conclusion. Meanwhile lots of companies are building successful, profitable applications on AWS.
Re: Amazon Snowball
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
It may cost that much to buy that capacity, but it costs a lot more than that to run the large scale organizations (CAPEX/OPEX) that build and buy these services. You're not just paying for a pipe, you're paying for the corporation.
> You're not just paying for a pipe, you're paying for the corporation. You are paying their profit margin, yeah. It is wildly overpriced, no matter how you look at it. Operating costs even when done on a much smaller and more inefficient scale than for AWS do not make the total cost for incremental bandwidth usage THAT much larger.
Are there any alternatives for the service that are cheaper, with the same reliability?