the biggest message this sends is something nobody is talking about: amazon is not afraid of sending hardware on-premises.
Amazon Snowball
181–190 of 202 posts
Re: Amazon Snowball
#182Forgive me, but what exactly is 'petabyte-scale' about a 50TB NAS with a dog-slow link?
Re: Amazon Snowball
#183Earlier 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…
I think (based on your child comment too) that you're conflating AWS and Amazon. Amazon sells things and also allows you to sell things, and that creates a conflict of interest, which has apperently caused problems. I am unsure how much of the problem was direct maliciousness on Amazon's part, admittedly - I suspect naivete on the part of some marketplace users, imagining that Amazon would never sell the same product as them, or would never lower the price of a competing product. Certainly it would seem obvious not to try and compete with Amazon on price or availability, you will always lose eventually.
However, AWS is a different thing altogether - it is a set of services that can be used to run parts of your business. Now, if your business involves simply reselling those services, or is predicated the availability and pricing of one of those services being a major part of the value for a service you sell (i.e. the value you add is marginal, with the majority of the product or service's value residing in the service AWS provides) then you are again in a situation where AWS may also decide to offer the same service, and will probably be able to do so more cheaply and profitably.
Again, this would not be a malicious act or directed attack on your business through inside information, and it seems naiive to assume so. You must have been able to determine a market existed and a need could be fulfilled profitably by providing this service, there is no reason a company like AWS could not reach the same conclusion with its vastly larger amount of resources. The possibility of this sort of thing happening should have been determined during due diligence and market analysis anyway, so it should not be a surprise if it happens.
But companies in traditional lines of business using AWS to save money, or using AWS to build a product where the value provided to the customer is inherent in the service provided, not the infrastructure used, are going to be fine. Nobody worries about the electricity company stealing your idea for a product run using electricity...
Re: Amazon Snowball
#184Earlier 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…
> at least until you POC it for us
This is a complete non-issue for users of AWS unless they are essentially trying to resell AWS services.
> companies that have had their physical goods ideas stolen and are now mass produced at Amazon
AWS is not Amazon, they do different things - see my GP comment replying to you. I also wonder how many times this has actually happened (stealing ideas) in reality, versus the companies simply having an unsustainable business model, or an obvious product. It sounds like the classic case of looking for someone to blame for their own incompetence, and choosing Amazon instead of some other huge corporation or the government, which are also common scapegoats...
Re: Amazon Snowball
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
So you're saying S3 is the alternative to S3 ... ?
Re: Amazon Snowball
#186An AWS version of a sneakernet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet
"Sneakernet" is an amusing term to me, because prior to the advent of widespread, high-speed Internet access, this was the only way to transfer large amounts of data.
Actually the term was invented long before Internet access was widely available, let alone high speed. It describes transfering data between computers located in the same room (or building) using floppy disks. The alternative was to use some kind of networking, like 10baseT coax ethernet, or one of the many other competing standards, that existed back in the early eighties.
And before the Internet was commonplace, people had to use data lines provisioned by the telephone company to link distant offices, and could also send data that way, as larger companies still do.
Re: Amazon Snowball
#187But can you trust it?
When I returned to JPL after working at Google for a year I was tasked with evaluating a Google Search Appliance. We ultimately decided not to keep it, and so we had to erase the disks, which now contained sensitive data. The appliance had a "self-destruct" feature that supposedly erased all the data, but there was no way to verify it. After lengthy negotiations with Google (some people just have a hard time grasping the idea that just because a file has been deleted doesn't mean the data is actually gone) we eventually got them to agree to let us open the enclosure and take out the disks. Forensic analysis revealed that they had not in fact been erased.
Caveat emptor.
Re: Amazon Snowball
#188Earlier 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.
Well, apart from meaning a ball of snow, such as might be thrown by children at each other for fun. Really, that's where my mind went with the word 'snowball', much like the rest of the anglophone world. Yes, there may be slang and other juvenile repurposings of the word, but in normal, everyday (well, wintertime everyday) usage snowball means exactly what the OED says it means. Not sure why anyone would imagine otherwise?
Re: Amazon Snowball
#189Re: Amazon Snowball
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hasn't really impacted Netflix and pretty much every other customer using AWS.
Amazon just went to war with Apple and Google. Do you really think they won't give Netflix the shaft when it suits their strategic interest?
Their strategic needs of keeping AWS as a trusted platform override any potential gains from giving Netflix the shaft - particularly since they'd be stupid to assume that Netflix doesn't have a contingency plan.