I see this and think "oh look, a surveillance company made another spy device they want me to buy and put in my home."
It's a RasPi that glows in the dark
AWS Snowcone
141–150 of 221 posts
Re: AWS Snowcone
#142I wonder if AWS are shooting themselves in the foot (if these things become very popular), by making the "Cloud" a physical, tangible thing. I think part of the lustre for some customers is that they don't know what they're paying for when they start a 2 vCPU EC2 instance and must think it's something crazy complex and special. Now having it on your desk in a tiny little box will make them wonder what they pay so muc…
One of the main reasons that we're running our own hardware is because it's difficult and cost prohibitive for us to get our data to a cloud provider.
We're running a sort of sneakernet between our data collection agents and our data ingestion locations, each day each location receives 2-4 encrypted SSD's (Samsung T5) with up to 1TB of data. That then gets uploaded to our central location (overnight) for processing, and the next morning they're drained and ready for the next mission.
If Amazon had launched this earlier, and our cashflow (or funding :P) a bit better then maybe we'd have opted for running a constant stream of these snowcones to Amazon. Though processing costs are also a big concern, the cloud providers are at least twice as expensive as running metal, even when looking at 1 year paying for the hardware up front, and if you're cost sensitive when buying the hardware it could be 3-4 times cheaper than the managed cloud.
What I'd be afraid of with this server is losing them in the mail. I wonder if they've got a system where you could mirror two snowcones before you send one to them.
Re: AWS Snowcone
#143Earlier 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."
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...
Re: AWS Snowcone
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
A residential cable connection realistically offers something like 25Mbps down/3Mbps up. That's 246 days to upload 8TB!
According to Speedtest.net [0], the average US internet speed is 138Mbps down/51Mbps up. That's certainly not amazing, but on average that's only ~2 weeks to upload 8 TB. I can certainly see where this makes more sense if you're below that average, though. 0: https://www.speedtest.net/global-index/united-states#fixed
Also, what type of customers run speed test normally? Those on the more technical side, thus those running the test are likely to have higher level packages from their providers, further skewing the data
Re: AWS Snowcone
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't mean to sound snarky but isn't "local storage of personal data" what off the shelf NAS devices (QNAP, Synology, WD..) have been doing for almost two decades? Even the backup thing, last time I tried they all had some pretty simple UI built around a rsync fork
I was thinking more having a "personal cloud" between trusted connected devices at different sites.
Being able to buy/rent an AWS outpost of this size for home use would actually be pretty neat.
Re: AWS Snowcone
#146Earlier 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-...
What was the premium of storing the data in S3 as opposed to keeping it in your own tape warehouse? Definitely curious about the cost benefits!
Unfortunately I don't have access to that info, sorry!
Re: AWS Snowcone
#147AWS Snowcone pricing here: https://aws.amazon.com/snowcone/pricing/
Hmm. A $2,000 loss fee. I sure hope they don't use Amazon delivery. They'll deliver stuff to other houses, complete with a "delivery proof" picture of the wrong house and claim that you must have lost it.
Ironically you'll notice all the pictures of the snow-family devices have UPS labels.
EX https://media.amazonwebservices.com/blog/2020/snow_luna_1.jp... and https://www.slideshare.net/AmazonWebServices/new-launch-intr...
Re: AWS Snowcone
#148Wow, this could be awesome for running operation teams at Burning Man!
(Seriously, at the moment, some teams literally offline their server and physically take it to the playa to run there instead of figuring out connectivity there. Very little of it's using newer tech)
Re: AWS Snowcone
#149Interesting. So you can launch an EC2 instance with 8TB storage in your closet, or handbag, or under the desk at your medical facility, or whatever. I gotta say, sounds kinda fun. Maybe would be handy for serving video content etc on a local network? Or if you have a network of video cameras not connected to the internet, use this for daily/weekly collection of recorded content?
What you describe is NAS. Popular brands give enough resources to run VMs, Docker containers, even perform 4K transcoding etc.
Re: AWS Snowcone
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."
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.