Amazon Snowball • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon Snowball

#81

Post by johansch » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 6:13 PM UTC

utrex wrote: post #78

devit wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... 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)

It may cost that much to buy that capacity, but it costs a lot more than that to run the large scale organizations (CAPEX/OPEX) that build and buy these services. You're not just paying for a pipe, you're paying for the corporation.

> 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.

Re: Amazon Snowball

#82

Post by mpeg » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 6:14 PM UTC

unabridged wrote: post #75

mpeg wrote: post #17

I'm curious about how they're going to approach this from the fraud perspective. This is a $200 charge for a device that has 50TB storage, which would probably cost you around $2000 to buy. There's people out there that will sign a contract under a fake name / address with a phone provider and sell the phones, and the way the providers fight against it usually by running credit checks and verifying address against th…

You still need a credit card attached to the account. A car rental company will give you a $30k vehicle for under $100 on just a credit card.

That's because you pick it up in person and they check / scan your id once you're there.

Re: Amazon Snowball

#83

Post by karlkatzke » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 6:18 PM UTC

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)

I really don't think there's a word that doesn't mean /something/ dirty in some part of the world.

Re: Amazon Snowball

#84

Post by kobayashi » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 6:18 PM UTC

utrex wrote: post #78

devit wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... 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)

It may cost that much to buy that capacity, but it costs a lot more than that to run the large scale organizations (CAPEX/OPEX) that build and buy these services. You're not just paying for a pipe, you're paying for the corporation.

Exactly, I don't know why so many people seem to miss this. The charges may not reflect the cost of that particular service, but if one looks to the service as a whole, it's not that badly priced. Costs cover the infrastructure, which we reasonably expect to contain multiple redundancies, as well as a profit margin for the business.

Re: Amazon Snowball

#85

Post by driverdan » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 6:18 PM UTC

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?

Re: Amazon Snowball

#86

Post by toomuchtodo » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 6:19 PM UTC

imajes wrote: post #80

toomuchtodo wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3 cents/GB is cheap . Go 1 cent a GB S3's infrequent access class (since you won't be incurring the charge for retrieval through S3, you'll be pulling back out through Snowball), and its even cheaper. $10/TB/month? Where else can I store data reliably that cheap? (Yes, Backblaze is half that price. I hope they become a worthy adversary to AWS S3 to drive prices further down).

If it cost you about $1000 to buy a diskpack (4*6TB drives) you could create backups and send them to at least a half dozen locations for less money than using S3 to store that data. Yes, S3 is cheap(ish). But given Snowball is a snapshot backup service, it's not comparatively cheaper than it would be to distribute that same data by creating a clone and sending it to a safe place.

That's not really how business IT works (unless you're sending tape off to Iron Mountain, which has its own costs and storage fees).

S3 is the cheapest "real" business storage option besides Backblaze's new storage offering. S3 can't be compared to shipping disks someplace where they sit offline.

Re: Amazon Snowball

#87

Post by kobayashi » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 6:20 PM UTC

jonknee wrote: post #71

devit wrote: post #24

As usual, the pricing is not very friendly, and apparently designed to lock your data into AWS or exploit your weak negotiating position once you buy in. While you can send in 50TB for $200, taking the same 50TB out costs an additional $1500 charge (50000 * 0.03). [assuming they are not transferring the data over the Internet, the cost to AWS should be the same or cheaper for reading]

Well if you sent it in you already have a copy. Don't delete it and you can save the $1500.

I think the idea is that if one needs to recall the data from AWS it's due to something like data loss

Re: Amazon Snowball

#88

Post by guimarin » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 6:21 PM UTC

utrex wrote: post #78

devit wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... 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)

It may cost that much to buy that capacity, but it costs a lot more than that to run the large scale organizations (CAPEX/OPEX) that build and buy these services. You're not just paying for a pipe, you're paying for the corporation.

You're right, AWS just breaks even with their pricing.

Re: Amazon Snowball

#89

Post by hsod » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 6:29 PM 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)

what does "overpriced" mean in this context? "overpriced" compared to what? is there another company offering a similar service for a lower price?

Re: Amazon Snowball

#90

Post by meritt » Wed, Oct 07, 2015, 6:30 PM UTC

When I export data from S3, what do I get for a given bucket? Just basically a file system? How is the metadata stored? What about object versions?

I'm curious what the end result looks like in doing this.