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Amazon Snowball

aws.amazon.com

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Re: Amazon Snowball

#171

Post by vacri »

rylee wrote: post #114
dx211 wrote: post #57

Earlier 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.

> 0.05 seconds to deform before coming to a halt

I always found it amusing that hard drives were rated in the hundreds of Gs until someone reminded me that 'time to stop' when dropped on a hard surface was very short indeed...

Re: Amazon Snowball

#172

Post by MichaelGG »

Swannie wrote: post #156
MichaelGG wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Presumably if their sensors say the system has been cracked open, they don't just ship it out to another user. (And they could have many layers of sensors, telling them if it was just via damage (hitting it with a forklift) or someone really getting in.) Considering the potential downside, I'm sure they've done some work here.

Re: Amazon Snowball

#173

Post by vacri »

meritt wrote: post #107
icebraining wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Currently, Snowball doesn't support exporting data." http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSImportExport/latest/DG/limits....

Wow. Amazon is really embracing the ship fast, break things, roll with the MVP even when it lacks 50% of the features.

The thing about an MVP is that it is still a VP.

Re: Amazon Snowball

#174

Post by vacri »

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)

Remember when the iPad came out and everyone made tampon jokes? Fast forward 5 years...

Re: Amazon Snowball

#175

Post by A010 »

unfletch wrote: post #110
notatoad wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless i'm mis-judging the scale of this thing, that screen looks a fair bit smaller than a kindle. I think it's just techcrunch using "kindle" as a generic word for e-ink display.

The Amazon exec who introduced the Snowball during the keynote also called it included a "Kindle".

Perhaps a mini kindle, I estimate by the image that's about 2x4" max.

Re: Amazon Snowball

#178

Post by Swannie »

eru wrote: post #162
Swannie wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

Nobody needs to trust the device, actually. Assume Amazon only loads it up with encrypted data over network untrusted, and the customer only takes off the encrypted data over untrusted network.

Depends on your definition of trust.

But yes, if you assume this device is treated as malicious at both ends - just like an unfiltered internet connection, but 10x worse - and that the client software that is doing the load/verification, or unload/verification is doing decent input validation, and your assumption that the user is doing their own encryption prior to transfering it to the device, I agree.

Re: Amazon Snowball

#179

Post by grantc »

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…

Mainframe Marty shows up.

Re: Amazon Snowball

#180

Post by faizshah »

azinman2 wrote: post #91
johansch wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

What's the alternative?

Centurylink has a pretty formidable IaaS offering, it's very well priced and they charge very little (comparatively) for bandwidth. The only problem is their storage solution is extremely expensive but using S3 or soon Backblaze B2 as a storage layer is good enough for me.
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