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Amazon Glacier

aws.amazon.com

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Re: Amazon Glacier

#51

Post by masterzora »

OoTheNigerian wrote: post #38

What I find fascinating with Amazon's infrastructure push is the the successful 'homonymization' of their brand name Amazon. Amazon simultaneously stands for ecommerce and web infrastructure depending on the context. e.g "Hey I want to host my server".. "Why don't you try Amazon". "Do you know where I can get a fair priced laptop?" "Check Amazon". Is there any other brand that has done this successfully? Edit: I shou…

This actually confused me when I saw the headline. I saw 'Amazon' and, despite having been working with AWS all night, thought ecommerce first and couldn't figure out what they could name 'Glacier'. I was kind-of-not-really hoping it was going to be a new shipping option guaranteed to take a long time. That said, the actual service looks solid.

Re: Amazon Glacier

#52

Post by nicolas314 »

One recurrent issue with Amazon services is that they charge in US$ and currently do not accept euros. European banks charge an arm and a leg for micropayment conversions: last time I got a bill from AWS for 0.02$ it ended up costing me 20 euros or so. Pretty much kills the deal. One solution could be to pre-pay 100$ on an account and let them debit as needed.

Re: Amazon Glacier

#53

Post by Gussy »

From the retrieval times they are giving, it seems plausible that they could be only booting the servers 5 or 6 times a day, to run the upload and retrieval jobs stored in a buffer system of sorts. Having the servers turned off for the majority of the time would same an immense amount of power, although I wonder about the wear on drives spinning up and down compared to being always on.

Any other theories on how this works on the backend while still being profitable?

Re: Amazon Glacier

#54

Post by cayblood »

martey wrote: post #16

I think one of the most interesting parts of this is how they plan to ensure that people do not use it for transient backup: https://aws.amazon.com/glacier/faqs/#How_am_I_charged_for_de... Deleting data from Amazon Glacier is free if the archive being deleted has been stored for three months or longer. If an archive is deleted within three months of being uploaded, you will be charged an early deletion fee. In the US…

So I guess that means it would still work well for a scheme like time machine uses, where incremental changes are added but deletions are simply made note of. At least I think that's how it works.

Re: Amazon Glacier

#55

Post by cperciva »

ibotty wrote: post #30

that's certainly interesting. as there will be migration from s3 to glacier, it would be nice if tarsnap had an option to store only the (say) last week in s3 (with .3$/gb/month) and the rest in glacier (with, say, .03$/gb/month). that would certainly be very nice. cperciva, what do you think?

I can't see any way for Tarsnap to use this right now. When you create a new archive, you're only uploading new blocks of data; the server has no way of knowing which old blocks of data are being re-used. As a result, storing any significant portion of a user's data in Amazon Glacier would mean that all archive extracts would need to go out to Glacier for data...

Also, with Tarsnap's average block size (~ 64 kB uncompressed, typically ~ 32 kB compressed) the 50 microdollar cost per Glacier RETRIEVAL request means that I'd need to bump the pricing for tarsnap downloads up to about $1.75 / GB just to cover the AWS costs.

I may find a use for Glacier at some point, but it's not something Tarsnap is going to be using in the near future.

Re: Amazon Glacier

#56

Post by jhack »

This sounds really appealing as a NAS backup solution, but I'm a bit concerned about security and privacy. Let's say I want to backup and upload my CDs and movies, would Amazon be monitoring what I upload and assume I'm doing something illegal?

Re: Amazon Glacier

#57

Post by tommoor »

buro9 wrote: post #41

This is a really good offering for media that you typically will keep locally for instant access, yet you want to have an off-site backup in a way that lives for a very long time. Dropbox should work here, but it's simply too expensive. My photo library is 175GB. That isn't excessive when considering I store the digital negatives and this represents over a decade. I don't mind not being able to access it for a few ho…

Perhaps DropBox et al will be able to make use of this Infrastructure to lower the costs of their service...

Re: Amazon Glacier

#59

Post by avar »

jhack wrote: post #56

This sounds really appealing as a NAS backup solution, but I'm a bit concerned about security and privacy. Let's say I want to backup and upload my CDs and movies, would Amazon be monitoring what I upload and assume I'm doing something illegal?

Just use GPG to encrypt your files before you upload them.

Re: Amazon Glacier

#60

Post by miles932 »

newhouseb wrote: post #42

It's a bit strange how S3 has a 'US Standard' region option, while Glacier has the usual set of regions (US East, US West, etc). I wonder if this means that unlike S3, Glacier isn't replicated across regions?

US Standard isn't replicated across regions.
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