About 3 months ago, I needed >50Gb of data uploaded to AWS and I asked a friend of mine who works at Amazon for help. He asked around and told me to mail the external storage to Amazon with keys/bucket info and a special code. I UPSed the stuff and within 2 days of arrival, I received an email with a notification that the transfer was done. Later on, I got the storage back. Everything worked as advertised!<p>I guess there's so much demand for this sneakernet that they made an official service. I wonder how many other people asked for transfer help before today's announcement...
When I read the announcement this morning, it occurred to me that the reason I like AWS so much, and what separates them from other cloud offerings, is that they're doing stuff dev teams actually <i>want</i> and can <i>use</i> (not impenetrably complex tech we could use with some vendor consultancy). Import features like this are trivial for AWS to implement - but will be a step change for some customers.<p>Last generation vendors saying 'anyone can do what AWS are doing' is just crap. You can't buy the enthusiasm these guys have - and its not just one individual - if you talk to anyone from AWS (and they're often around nights/weekends to talk about stuff) they are in a different lane to the competition or vendors that should be the competition.
Living in a country that's stuck on the end of an expensive and slow(ish) undersea cable for the past few years, sometimes my thoughts wander towards something like this. Even just a service (US-based) that would download a set of files (HTTP, FTP, bittorrent), burn them to DVD, and post them via airmail would be pretty handy. Bonus points if there was a way to use airline passengers as your couriers, such that the total latency might only be ~24 hours. :)
Google had a neat feature related to this in implementation but not goal since 2007ish. It was called Google Datasets and let you mail in a hard drive. Google would then host the data on the web. It's audience was purely academic, though... no money exchange involved.<p>Anyway, it got cut back last Fall. Cool to see it's still living on in some form.
How do they do virus and security checking? I don't know how they import the data, but it could be that they use a system that can be exploited using a security vulnerability?<p>It's a (very) long shot for this kind of thing to work, but still it's a risk worth asking about. They are at the end of they day hooking up hardware to their computer - i.e. physical access to the machine.
Also check out Terascale Sneakernet from Jim Gray et al. from 2002: <a href="http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=64570" rel="nofollow">http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=6457...</a>
This is going to be great for professional photographers (the industry I work in). I'm been advocating they use S3 for archiving for some time ... now it's easier to get your files there.
hmm... maybe i'll sneakernet all my music/photos now. been waiting for a sneakernet uploading service. it was only a matter of time before they added one.
wonder how long before smugmug adds a wraper around this and lets you send your dvd/smartcard/etc media and get it directly uploaded into your account.