Snowball Edge – Petabyte-scale data transport with on-board storage and compute | Hacker News Reader

Snowball Edge – Petabyte-scale data transport with on-board storage and compute

aws.amazon.com

60 pointsirs10 comments

The benefits aren't entirely clear.

> Many organizations are concerned that once they have moved all their data to the cloud it will be both expensive and time-consuming to retrieve the data if needed. Snowball Edge offers all customers a fast and inexpensive way to transfer large amounts of data both into and out of AWS.

Ingress to S3 is already free, the biggest problem is egress and that's left quite ambiguous. The pricing page points back to S3, which says "it depends". Where exactly does Snowball go within AWS itself? Is it classified as EC2? Is egress to the snowball free if it's in the same region as the data? Can the region be chosen?

Data transfers are always between the Snowball box and S3 storage. There's a flat per-transfer fee of $250 in addition to data transfer charges ($200 for the smaller model). Data Snowball->S3 is free, data S3->Snowball depends on which Region the S3 storage is in, everywhere except Asia, it's $0.03/GB. There's also physical shipping charges for the Snowball box.

https://aws.amazon.com/snowball/pricing/

Ingress to S3 is only free if your time is free and you have no deadline. Imagine migrating a a business built atop lots of local data (say movies or massive amounts of pictures).

It's not free from your network perspective, and typically this much data would take a lot longer to throw over the net.

This is a somewhat odd use-case, but does anyone know - do you have to transfer the data to S3? What if I just needed an extra 100-300TB of local storage for 10 days? Let's say for a backup during a move, or something like that. The description reads like this is possible, even if it's an unusual way to use the device.

Based on the Philips customer use case on the front page, it seems it would work for this use case.

Sounds like they are using it as a "AWS Cloud in a box" type thing with no intention of returning it to AWS.

> All encryption is performed on the device itself

Mm. This could be a MITM/"tap" attack vector, I guess?

[*] https://aws.amazon.com/snowball-edge/details/

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say there's some sort of amazon event on today

Well, it's _the_ Amazon event of the year, the annual AWS re:Invent: http://reinvent.awsevents.com/

I was wondering the same, many new amazon products poping up on HN

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