Amazon Snowball • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon Snowball

#151

Post by chrismarlow9 » Thu, Oct 08, 2015, 1:03 AM UTC

balls187 wrote: post #149

chrismarlow9 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not cloud vs cloud. It's cloud vs vps vs colo vs in-house/datacenters. Cloud is one option, and a heavily mis-used one for multiple purposes, security being a popular one this year.

Re: Amazon Snowball

#152

Post by kuschku » Thu, Oct 08, 2015, 1:04 AM UTC

gtremper wrote: post #109

devit wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compared to marginal cost. There are companies offering prices much more similar to cost, for example: - Hetzner.de servers/colocation offers additional traffic at 1.39 EUR/TB = 0.00158 $/GB - DigitalOcean offers 1TB traffic with $5/month instances = 0.005 $/GB

The price of something is determined by how much people are willing to pay for it, not the marginal cost. We don't pay people based on the marginal cost to keep them alive.

Actually, in many jobs, we do. That’s why several countries have defined a minimum wage, and why so many people in society work minimum-wage jobs.

Re: Amazon Snowball

#153

Post by kuschku » Thu, Oct 08, 2015, 1:08 AM UTC

sengstrom wrote: post #65

The math for the time to transfer comparison is interesting: "Even with high-speed Internet connections, it can take months to transfer large amounts of data. For example, 100 terabytes of data will take more than 100 days to transfer over a dedicated 100 Mbps connection. That same transfer can be accomplished in less than one day, plus shipping time, using two Snowball appliances." With a 100 Mbps connection it take…

Snowball is just a device with a 10Gbps port – so if you have 10Gbps, you won’t need Snowball ;)

Re: Amazon Snowball

#154

Post by Swannie » Thu, Oct 08, 2015, 1:11 AM UTC

Tinyyy wrote: post #143

icebraining wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?).

This is 100% the scenario I was just imagining.

Obviously this device has been designed to be a multi-time use device.

Amazon definitely do NOT have physical control over this box. They would need to do a complete low level reflash of every single bit of firmware on there, every time it came back. That's not actually that inconceivable in a enterprise grade server, and I hope to see some interesting details about that.

But still... just imagine some of the fun HDD firmware hacks making their way onto this. Or NIC firmware. Or even just the embedded Kindle being rooted, and used to sniff out Wifi networks, report its location via 3G, etc.

Not to mention the obvious data recovery attacks if the disks have not been wiped to the highest levels.

I agree with parent comments, and assume Amazon would put this on its own untrusted VLAN when it comes back. But would they weight it first to see if any pwnies have been inserted into the box? Visually inspect inside to see if physical components have been removed to ensure the weight is actually the same, despite a pwnie inside?

I really hope Amazon put out advice to their customers on how to connect this - ideally it should just be on a point to point link to a sacrificial server containing the data.

Re: Amazon Snowball

#155

Post by nickzoic » Thu, Oct 08, 2015, 1:13 AM UTC

vvanders wrote: post #3

The e-ink display showing a shipping label is brilliant.

Really? Why? I mean, Kindles are pretty cheap, but sticky shipping labels are a few bucks for rolls of 500, and very hard to damage in transit.

Re: Amazon Snowball

#156

Post by Swannie » Thu, Oct 08, 2015, 1:29 AM UTC

MichaelGG wrote: post #121

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.

Tamper detection won't prevent anything. It would just be an indicator that something appears to have happened.

The software load that is wiped every time is a first, and extremely basic, line of defence.

Realistically I'd hope the OS is on a SD card that they can literally take out and throw away after they have the data off (you can pwn the micro-controller on an SD card) - and replace with a freshly baked card.

Re: Amazon Snowball

#157

Post by Swannie » Thu, Oct 08, 2015, 1:33 AM UTC

pc2g4d wrote: post #141

Named after the horse in Animal Farm?

I assume named after the fact that a snowball is a lump of cloud matter, in a flight ready state?

Re: Amazon Snowball

#158

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Oct 08, 2015, 1:34 AM UTC

vidarh wrote: post #140

rgbrenner wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I sort-of agree with you, but in this case I believe it will persist for years to come, as they have faced competitors charging far less for bandwidth for years already and pretty much ignored it.

[deleted]

Re: Amazon Snowball

#159

Post by dexterdog » Thu, Oct 08, 2015, 1:43 AM UTC

devit wrote: post #59

desdiv wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$1700 is amazingly cheap when you consider that it costs $4300 [0] to transfer that same 50TB out of EC2. [0] https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ $4300 = 10000 * $0.09 + 40000 * $0.085

... which is also wildly overpriced. According to multiple sources, Internet transit in the US now costs less than 1$ for a 1 Mbps line for large deals, which translates to 1$ for 324GB, which translates to 0.003$ / GB. Amazon charges 15-30 times that. (it appears that traffic can be much more expensive in places other than the US and presumably Europe)

I live and love AWS but I never understood why they don't tier bandwidth charges per costumer.

Re: Amazon Snowball

#160

Post by eru » Thu, Oct 08, 2015, 1:52 AM UTC

kuschku wrote: post #152

gtremper wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The price of something is determined by how much people are willing to pay for it, not the marginal cost. We don't pay people based on the marginal cost to keep them alive.

Actually, in many jobs, we do. That’s why several countries have defined a minimum wage, and why so many people in society work minimum-wage jobs.

In America. There are countries without minimum wage that do just fine. (Singapore, and eg pre-2014 Germany.)