I must not interact with big enough data to understand, but what is the point of this? I have watched/read several of the Snow product descriptions from AWS and I am still not quite sure I understand the point.<p>It seems like a way to sync local big data to AWS cloud storage for data that is too large to realistically transfer via the internet. So is this simply a sneakernet external harddrive because physically shipping an 8TB hard drive has better bandwidth than using the internet?<p>I would love it if someone could explain a couple of use cases for the Snow family of products to someone that has never had to handle 100 GB of data much less terabytes.
The e-ink display part triggers thoughts of an Amazon of the future that uses entirely reusable boxes to ship things to consumers. Hard plastic containers w/ e-ink labels. Boom, no more millions (billions? trillions?) of cardboard/plastic boxes used to enclose packages. Still millions/billions/trillions of boxes/plastic packaging for the items themselves, but at least the transit envelope would be reusable.
This must be where all the traded-in Kindle screens are going. I was surprised Amazon was willing to pay me $25 for my 7-year-old Kindle, but I guess it's cheaper than manufacturing new eInk displays.<p>Maybe I'm a germophobe, but isn't it kind of gross that this thing is shipped in no container and then put on your desk?
Just think of all the “snow” products as a modern version of sneaker net (it used to be faster to run down the hall with a disk than transfer files over the network because networks used to be really slow).<p>The snow products solve the same issues. Despite fiber connections and such it just doesn’t make sense to transfer massive volumes of data over the network. It’s often literally faster and cheaper to ship a box of hard drives via UPS or FedEx.<p>Snowball was for big sets of files and is the size of a suitcase. Snowmobile is for petabyte scale and is literally a tractor trailer full of disks.<p>The use case here seems to be more towards remote situations with smaller data. You have something that collects a lot of data and need to get that into your cloud. Instead of running around with a bunch if portable hard drives and then having someone transfer the data manually to S3 over the internet you just dump your data into the snowcone and hand it to your local UPS guy and let AWS take care of the rest. Lots of remote data collection devices and such would fit into that model.<p>Clearly the use case is rather specific but for people in the business of collecting data on stuff and then needing to get it into the cloud this is actually a nifty little device.
My AWS Snow Family visual notes: <a href="https://www.awsgeek.com/AWS-Snow-Family/" rel="nofollow">https://www.awsgeek.com/AWS-Snow-Family/</a>
Interesting at the very least for retrieval of backups from S3 Deep Glacier. Because the Glacier retrieval fees with bulk transfer are only 0.003 (yes 0.3 cent, not 3 cent) per GB. The thing that kills the backup use-case is $ 0.09 per GB bandwidth costs to the internet. The Snowcone brings that down to $ ~0.037 + shipping if you use the full 8TB per device.<p>And that includes a $ 0.03 bandwidth fee from S3 tot Snowcone that I guess they're going to reduce over time since it's all on their internal network.
This is nice! I want a homelab for my data, but I like AWS. It'd be cool to run my own personal database on this, and only run pg_backup to S3. RDS is too expensive for personal projects, but I'm not sure if free Heroku dynos and such aren't enough for raw data processing. So yeah, I guess if AWS had tiny RDS with primary node as Snowcone, I'd buy one. Otherwise I might buy one later and install my own database on it.<p>Not sure where AWS is going with this, but I'd like to see AWS offer a tiny version of AWS Outposts, where you can get any kind of AWS service in a box.
I wonder if AWS are shooting themselves in the foot (if these things become very popular), by making the "Cloud" a physical, tangible thing. I think part of the lustre for some customers is that they don't know what they're paying for when they start a 2 vCPU EC2 instance and must think it's something crazy complex and special. Now having it on your desk in a tiny little box will make them wonder what they pay so much for.<p>The other thought I have is that maybe there's a market for shipping around bytes in mail boxes not just between a business and AWS, but just any people and businesses. I've seen B2 and Dropbox (I think) also have these "we'll ship you a drive" things, but maybe they'd outsource that for example to a third party who just did it really well and cheaply.
Interesting. So you can launch an EC2 instance with 8TB storage in your closet, or handbag, or under the desk at your medical facility, or whatever. I gotta say, sounds kinda fun.<p>Maybe would be handy for serving video content etc on a local network?<p>Or if you have a network of video cameras not connected to the internet, use this for daily/weekly collection of recorded content?
I'm in the process of starting an ISP right now, so I've just been getting prices for dedicated fibre lines. So let's do some quick math.<p>A 1Gbps dedicated (uncontended) fibre line in Europe seems to be in the region of $/€/£600 per month. How much data can one push on that per day (assuming 1Gbit/s = 100Mb/s real world)?<p>In one day: 100 * 60 * 60 * 24 = 8.64Tb<p>So call it one snowcone per day. So you could in theory send 30 snowcones a month, a total snowcone value of $60*30 = $1800.<p>However, at $60/snowcone, you would have to send 10 snowcones per month before your own dedicated line breaks even.<p>So yeah, if you're sending 10 or more per month, every month, consider getting a dedicated line. But that seems like an unusual use case to me.<p>There's also a bunch of organisational reasons to use something like snowcone, I'm sure.
This is pure (wild) speculation given my experience with data needs that seem to fit the product. I bet one (the) customer profile for this was military or intelligence (before it was available to the public).<p>I say this given AWS prior gov/cia work. Securely capturing, transferring, and maintaining chain of custody for intel from various media and devices captured during raids or other activities was (several years ago) a total shit show. We had a closet full of trash bags from various raids. The analysts weren’t in the field, the op tempo and slow data rates prevented us from making good use of most of the data. Some of which was time sensitive (we would find out weeks later). Also some of the data captured was to be used as evidence in the host nation legal system (I don’t know if that ever happened) or (presumably) GITMO. I was just a grunt at the time, and this was a long time ago but I bet the problem still exists.
I'd love to see an "expedited import" option for this, where the device gets shipped to an AWS facility right near the carrier overnight hub and imported into S3 that night, landing in S3 by ~2am and able to be processed and delivered to customers before they get to work the next morning.<p>For many remote data collection activities this could remove the need for expensive and long lead fiber installation.
This is really cool. Is there documentation somewhere of what exactly the compute hardware looks like inside? 2 CPUs and 4GB of RAM, but is it x86 or ARM (I presume x86, but since it has to be on battery power..)? What size of EC2 instance can fit on there?
I have no opinion on the necessity of this product (sucks that 100Gbps networks are still confined to datacenters), but did they reuse a backlight Kindle display for the screen that becomes the shipping label? That's neat, I love it when people take advantage of things other parts of their company did.
Oh, fun! When a good Chinese manufacturer duplicates the form factor, someone can ship clones of these laden with malware for spear-phishing attacks on corporate, industrial, and classified networks.<p>> I connect the Snowcone to the power supply and to my network, and power up! After a few seconds of initialization, the device shows its IP address and invites me to connect:<p>With a convincing e-Ink display, and an unusually long delay, you've probably got a good 10 minutes on this local network to 0-day your way into routers and client machines.<p>> Next, I download AWS OpsHub for Snow Family, install it, and then configure it to access the device. I select Snowcone and click Next:<p>By this point you make the device self-brick and print out an error about how it needs to be sent back to Amazon for repairs, due to being banged up during shipping. Extra scuffs or dents in the case will sell this. While the replacement is ordered, use your now client-resident malware to exfiltrate data as you like, since you know there's data worth them copying offline. Or trojan up every data format you see so that after the data is moved out via a working Snowball you can eventually find an internet-connected device to exfiltrate with.
I think that local storage of personal data ("data most important to you") will be a huge trend in the next few years for both homes and offices, especially if they can back up data to other trusted devices (in other homes and offices of trusted people). As always the problem is going to be usability - the AWS ecosystem is not friendly to non-techies.
I tried to use Snowball as part of a customer facing solution, but the lack of predictability around turnaround times made it impossible for me to justify the expense and overhead.<p>It is an awesome box and an awesome solution to a real life problem. I really wanted to love snowball.<p>I was not filling them all the way up by any means, so the turnaround had to be fast enough for me to justify it over just uploading to s3 over slowish connections.<p>The interface in the console was very opaque and gave no information about when the boxes would get shipped out.<p>I had weeks long delays with zero contact when the box types I wanted were out of stock and only found out that was the cause when I cried to support.<p>I also had boxes stall at the import stage after they had already been shipped back.<p>The software to transfer was also just ok.<p>I think with more love this can be a great tool, but there are some things that could make it better.
Is this the beginning of mini self-hosted clouds where the orchestration happens in a web UI but the compute/storage is local? Like a cheap version of Azure Stack? I get that you can’t keep the snowcone, but if you could, it would be a little VM host with local storage on your LAN that could let you run everything internal.
Wow, this could be awesome for running operation teams at Burning Man!<p>(Seriously, at the moment, some teams literally offline their server and physically take it to the playa to run there instead of figuring out connectivity there. Very little of it's using newer tech)
It's very tangential but what is the device shown next to the drive in the first picture? <a href="https://media.amazonwebservices.com/blog/2020/snowcone_jb_sticker_1.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://media.amazonwebservices.com/blog/2020/snowcone_jb_st...</a><p>I assumed it was here to give a sense of the relative size of the drive, but after staring at this picture for two minutes I genuinely have no idea what it is.<p>Actually at first I even wondered if <i>that</i> was the drive, since it's vaguely more in the shape of a snowcone than the drive itself.
Here is what I don't get about this product line. The docs say the encryption is done on the attached workstation. Which means your network transfer speed is going to be limited if you don't have a pretty high end machine with at least AESNI. What is the point of having the processor and all that in the device itself if you end up needing a high end workstation anyways to get the maximum performance out of the thing?
Something related from my previous job, for data storage there's Serverpack 35 from Acromove. 120 TB per box, suitcase form factor, includes tracking and remote control. You seal it and you load it in courier car.<p><a href="https://acromove.com/products/serverpack-35/" rel="nofollow">https://acromove.com/products/serverpack-35/</a><p>They also have Serverpack Edge which is supposed to do the same.
> The AMIs must be made from an instance launched from a CentOS or Ubuntu product in AWS Marketplace<p>I wonder what's special about these images.
So you need to have Windows or Mac OS in order to use this? No love for Linux?<p><a href="https://aws.amazon.com/en/snowcone/resources/" rel="nofollow">https://aws.amazon.com/en/snowcone/resources/</a>
Seems relatively risk-adverse. Glad they're providing more variety to their data transferral services, but this really does seem like an extremely niche system that not many companies will fully utilise.
Hey Jeff, curious what the battery life of this device is?<p>I'm on a team that has a need for remote compute power, but getting to our devices on anything more frequent than a monthly basis is sometimes a challenge.
All of this makes sense to me, except I have no idea how they fit 100tb of capacity in a box that small. Aren't HDDs maxing out around 16TB these days? They couldn't fit 6 drives in there.
What happened to the Google/AWS services where you could ship a raw HDD? It seems like they've both retired that service in favour of more expensive custom hardware.