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AWS Ground Station

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Re: AWS Ground Station

#171

Post by jsolson »

greglindahl wrote: post #166
jsolson wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work on Google Cloud and have an obvious bias here, but having thought about this for a couple year now, this does not seem like a good or cost-effective way to move that much data. In particular if you have ~100PB of data to move and you are in a location that can be reached by a 45-foot long shipping container on a truck with access to the ~350KW of power it takes to run Snowmobile, you're clearly not somewhere _…

I guess you didn't notice that Google Cloud has a thing that competes with Snowball? https://cloud.google.com/transfer-appliance Also, if you want to know an extreme edge case that can't (currently) be done any other way, consider the astronomical observatories at the South Pole.

I said Snowmobile doesn't make sense. Snowball makes total sense. The economics are entirely different.

Antarctica was the only place that came to mind, but I wasn't sure about the costs of getting a shipping container in / out.

Re: AWS Ground Station

#172

Post by jsolson »

snowwrestler wrote: post #139
jsolson wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work on Google Cloud and have an obvious bias here, but having thought about this for a couple year now, this does not seem like a good or cost-effective way to move that much data. In particular if you have ~100PB of data to move and you are in a location that can be reached by a 45-foot long shipping container on a truck with access to the ~350KW of power it takes to run Snowmobile, you're clearly not somewhere _…

It reads to me like you're saying: if you're going to spend $400k/month on storage cost, why not pay for a network buildout too? I don't think that allocating X per month for op-ex implies that you also have Y amount of money to spend on cap-ex... especially if you don't own the location. 350kw of power is just another trailer to pull up.

I am assuming that anyone who managed to accumulate 100 PB of data (or close enough to make this viable) is still accumulating data at a solid clip, or likely has a lot _more_ than just 100 PB of data

Re: AWS Ground Station

#173

Post by greglindahl »

jsolson wrote: post #171
greglindahl wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess you didn't notice that Google Cloud has a thing that competes with Snowball? https://cloud.google.com/transfer-appliance Also, if you want to know an extreme edge case that can't (currently) be done any other way, consider the astronomical observatories at the South Pole.

I said Snowmobile doesn't make sense. Snowball makes total sense. The economics are entirely different. Antarctica was the only place that came to mind, but I wasn't sure about the costs of getting a shipping container in / out.

For the south pole, they use C-130s, and not standard shipping containers. You can see the little ones that they use in the photo at the bottom of https://www.nsf.gov/geo/opp/support/lc130.jsp

Re: AWS Ground Station

#174

Post by anuraaga »

Used to work at a startup aiming to create a similar type of network. AWS joining was refreshing for validating the market and providing a big target to work against.

AWS / Lockheed made a good call with phased array antennas (SpaceX too on the satellite side). Can't scale to many different users if your ground stations can only serve one satellite at a time, similar for a satellite providing internet. I suspect there might still be challenges getting enough gain for high bandwidth, but I'm sure it'll improve with better tech. A dish is just physically stuck pointing at one angle.

Re: AWS Ground Station

#175

Post by jsolson »

jsjohnst wrote: post #159
jsolson wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work on Google Cloud and have an obvious bias here, but having thought about this for a couple year now, this does not seem like a good or cost-effective way to move that much data. In particular if you have ~100PB of data to move and you are in a location that can be reached by a 45-foot long shipping container on a truck with access to the ~350KW of power it takes to run Snowmobile, you're clearly not somewhere _…

> even relatively remote locations become "accessible" for 100 Gbps+ fiber or microwave connectivity, and _very_ remote locations for tens of Gbps. I’m guessing: 1. You’ve never priced out said circuits before 2. Never seen the lead times and minimum contract periods on them 3. Don’t realize in general how hard it is to actually max out circuits like that. Shipping / freight company is generally still a preferred sol…

Pretty good idea on #3 (and for much much much larger links), and a decent idea for #1.

If I had 1-10 PB to move I could totally see most people using FedEx to ship JBODs around. For small transfers it makes sense, and we also have a product for this. Internally I'd use our WAN for those, which is where this now starts to make sense: Amazon does not have anywhere near the global WAN capacity that we do, nor so far have they had a good reason to have that capacity.

If you've got the global capacity to allow a customer to peer to your nearest location (and your nearest location likely isn't too far away for most of the world), fiber makes sense for large (~EB-scale, which I assume anyone with 100PB+ is well on their way to 1EB+) amounts of data. We have a product for these peerings (primarily for customers in colos): https://cloud.google.com/interconnect/docs/concepts/dedicate...

Re: AWS Ground Station

#176

Post by jsolson »

greglindahl wrote: post #173
jsolson wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I said Snowmobile doesn't make sense. Snowball makes total sense. The economics are entirely different. Antarctica was the only place that came to mind, but I wasn't sure about the costs of getting a shipping container in / out.

For the south pole, they use C-130s, and not standard shipping containers. You can see the little ones that they use in the photo at the bottom of https://www.nsf.gov/geo/opp/support/lc130.jsp

Right, but Snowmobile is packaged as a shipping container because it has a small datacenter inside, so unless you can fit the assembled 45ft container in the plane, I don't think this works?

Those are big fucking planes, so maybe you can?

Re: AWS Ground Station

#177

Post by jsolson »

milesward wrote: post #167
mike_d wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is your first mistake: thinking the customer wants to solve the problem in a a good or cost-effective way. Snowmobile was built because a pre-sales engineer sarcastically said backing up a truck full of hard drives to a customers datacenter would be the fastest way to import X PB of data. It's probably loading from a tape silo and spent 18 months at the customer site.

No, it was built because a solutions architect sat next to a film producer on a plane and talked about how to solve for his unique needs.

Miles, I can't tell if you're messing with me or just stating what actually happened :)

Re: AWS Ground Station

#178

Post by anfractuosity »

kartikkumar wrote: post #153
anfractuosity wrote: post #11

I recall looking at this a while ago, but I couldn't seem to find what kind of RF hardware amazon is using, is there any information on that?

It's leveraging Lockheed technology [1]. [1] https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/verge.html

Thanks a lot! Will give that a watch.

Re: AWS Ground Station

#179

Post by myself248 »

elkos wrote: post #170

If you are interested in an open satellite ground-station network, with 330+ ground-station you may want to check out SatNOGS. https://satnogs.org The SatNOGS Network (https//network.satnogs.org) collects data from hundreds of satellites through hundreds of stations globally. More details on the satellites we monitor are on our satellite database( https://db.satnogs.org ). In some cases we are able to visualize the t…

That was my first thought, "oh, it's a commercial satnogs".

Which I suppose proves it's a good idea. :)

Re: AWS Ground Station

#180

Post by wildfire »

jsolson wrote: post #175
jsjohnst wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> even relatively remote locations become "accessible" for 100 Gbps+ fiber or microwave connectivity, and _very_ remote locations for tens of Gbps. I’m guessing: 1. You’ve never priced out said circuits before 2. Never seen the lead times and minimum contract periods on them 3. Don’t realize in general how hard it is to actually max out circuits like that. Shipping / freight company is generally still a preferred sol…

Pretty good idea on #3 (and for much much much larger links), and a decent idea for #1. If I had 1-10 PB to move I could totally see most people using FedEx to ship JBODs around. For small transfers it makes sense, and we also have a product for this. Internally I'd use our WAN for those, which is where this now starts to make sense: Amazon does not have anywhere near the global WAN capacity that we do, nor so far ha…

That product looks exactly like AWS Direct Connect

Also, when I go to: https://www.infrastructure.aws/

(annoyingly I can't link to the network) it says 100Gbps of WAN capacity around the AWS global network.

I did a quick search and wasn't able to find what it is for GCP -- do you have a link handy?

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