Introducing Amazon Cloud Drive | Hacker News Reader

Introducing Amazon Cloud Drive

amazon.com

159 pointsssclafani93 comments

I think tonight is one of those nights where all cellphones/pagers/beepers/inboxes are going crazy at Dropbox.

Should be interesting to see how they respond in the coming days - if at all.

I hope Dropbox realizes that they can't compete with their supplier on price - so they need to differentiate themselves on value.

These prices are seriously ridiculous. 50% lower across the board. Kinda messed up - but I am in no hurry to leave dropbox any time soon.

Keep doing what you do dropbox. I am rooting for you.

No-worry syncing is what distinguishing Dropbox for me. Of course, I'm just one of their free-loaders, and come to think of it I may not find Dropbox as useful in a couple of months when I'm finally done with school assignments forever.

Considering Dropbox is probably one of the biggest users of S3, it's not entirely impossible that they were in the know.

Not only is it not a surprise but I think Amazon.com are also well aware that Dropbox is likely developing their own storage back-end to move away from S3.

You have anything to substantiate this claim?

Just curious and intrigued.

It makes sense. Their biggest running cost right now will be Amazon. Up to a certain size S3 makes sense as it would cost more to run the infrastructure yourself and it might be less flexible (scale wise) as a smaller operation can't afford to have an awful lot of spare capacity lying around. As the userbase continues to grow though, there will come a time when running their own infrastructure will work out cheaper and more flexible and they might be able to profit from it the same way Amazon do (remember: Amazon's "cloud" services came about from wanting a way to make profitable (or at least cost neutral) use of all their spare capacity in the quieter ten months of the year), so they would be daft not to at least have some embryonic plans simmering away on their R&D people's back burners.

I fully agree and that makes sense. Just like 37Signals.

But I was wondering if there was something out there that showed that's what they are doing.

Migration costs and effort will be high. Still, they need to become less dependent from S3. We opted for dedicated hardware at https://secure.cloudsafe.com and do not regret it: Higher security level, more uptime and in the long run much cheaper. Even if you pay some extra dollars for redundancy with added storage capacities.

Is Dropbox bigger than Netflix in terms of traffic/storage?

I believe so http://pycon.blip.tv/file/4878722/

Considering Netflix accounts for 20% of evening traffic? Nope.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-20020434-17.html

Amazon's pricing here is the same as SpiderOak's, and Dropbox has been competing with us in the backup/sync space this whole time.

The industry has seen many of these these simple "cloud drive" products fail. I think the first was Xdrive. They just don't have the local response speed that users expect. I doubt Amazon will fail here, but as it is, this is not much in the way of competition for Dropbox or the rest of the sync industry. It's a different product all together.

Before your comment I don't think I'd heard of Xdrive. People know Amazon, Amazon already has a lot of users, and Amazon knows how to get people to buy things.

Odds are someone is going to have an account at Amazon rather than Dropbox, and when they go to the Cloud Drive site they see a massive button to upload files and get going immediately. As compared to Dropbox where the user has to download and install something first, and then go from there.

So yeah, I think Dropbox just lost a lot of potential users — sure, they may not have been the type of users who would pay Dropbox at first, but Amazon's service is only going to get better, and they're less likely to grow into a Dropbox paying user.

Entirely possible. Currently I am a dropbox customer and see no benefit in switching to Amazon. The only thing that would make me switch is if they came out with a Linux ARM client. It's the only hardware I have that doesn't have a native client and as more and more ARM devices are coming to market, more people will be wanting that. As a Linux developer, it does feel as if Linux is a third world citizen and the company I work for has offered to do the work for them in porting it to ARM but with no response. If Amazon were to make the ARM client they would definitely see uptake in clients on the devices.

Thats because you're too young....

Xdrive was what? '99/'00?

THats the funny thing about technology -- there isnt too much that is new -- its just that all the underlying factors for success are more mature, thus products today can succeed where ten years ago they failed.

/Lawn

So far, the killer advantage for Dropbox is it's simplicity. Just drop your files in your Dropbox folder on one computer, and they magically appear on all your other devices. There's no upload/download bullshit, it all happens in the background. Not to mention that it seamlessly resumes transfers anytime your connectivity is disrupted, which again reinforces the ease of use "drop it in the folder and forget it" factor.

I don't see anywhere on the Amazon site about historic versions of files. I have once-or-twice needed to back into my file history at DropBox to find some things.

http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2010/02/08/version...

and

http://aws.amazon.com/s3/faqs/#What_is_Versioning

This is nice but doesn't strike me as competition for Dropbox in any way. The strength of Dropbox is in the deceptively dead simple client interface that lets it work without you having to think about it.

Amazon isn't addressing that here.

Correct. There's no Mac/PC client that emulates a local drive/folder (yet). Just an Air MP3 uploadeder app and a web based file upload for other types of files.

I wonder if you could isolate the S3 bucket used and use existing S3 clients. Of course then you might as well use raw S3.

Take a look at point 5.2 of the Term of Use. Link: http://amzn.to/eeSaB3 Quote: " 5.2 Our Right to Access Your Files. You give us the right to access, retain, use and disclose your account information and Your Files: to provide you with technical support and address technical issues; to investigate compliance with the terms of this Agreement, enforce the terms of this Agreement and protect the Service and its users from fraud or security threats; or as we determine is necessary to provide the Service or comply with applicable law." ... not that encouraging imho.

They can't guarantee not accessing the files you store on their servers. That makes sense, though it's a bit creepy.

If you store encrypted files with them (and not store the encryption key in the same place) I guess it's not really an issue.

That's more than a bit creepy. "Disclose your files ... as we determine is necessary" means they can basically use it for whatever they want.

I don't ever upload any data onto these cloud file services that I don't encrypt locally first. It's inevitable imo that someone will eventually get into the servers at Dropbox, Amazon, or whatever. I think it's really naive to upload confidential data without making sure it's securely encrypted first.

I don't think Amazon is looking to compete with Dropbox but really iTunes in the cloud. For them, competing with Dropbox would be like shooting themselves in the foot. As long as Dropbox remains on S3, Amazon makes more money the more successful Dropbox gets. If they start to compete directly Dropbox will surely move to a cheaper solution and Amazon will loose a pretty large contract. They would also loose some trust with developers who feel Amazon might smash them at any moment. If Dropbox ever moved as they probably will, I think Amazon may consider competing, but even then don't seem to be in the business of creating client software (exception kindle).

You have made a really insightful comment, but I struggle to read it without wincing because of the misspellings.

lose, v. to part with something

loose, adj. not tight.

So yeah, Amazon might lose a large contract and might lose trust with developers. Sorry if it's a bit off-topic but I just wanted to mention how off-putting it is.

Sorry, I was half asleep and typing on my iPad

I'm curious what they mean by "secure", since they seem to be trumpeting it as a major selling point. They say that all communication goes through HTTPS, which is nice, but they don't say if the information is encrypted on their servers as well. Can someone who gets a VM running on the same machine use clever side-channel trickery to peek at my files? Can a government get Amazon to quietly reveal all my data?

What would be really nice is something where files get stored fully encrypted, with the key derived client-side from your username and password, and the connections all use HTTPS. (Or something similar. I'm not a security expert, so take this with a grain of salt.)

You could always use a truecrypt volume if you're paranoid.

If you are paranoid^, you wouldn't use TrueCrypt. http://brianpuccio.net/excerpts/is_truecrypt_really_safe_to_...

^ good sense of the word

Yikes! I am going to go bury my head in some nice sandy hole for a while and pretend the world is a nicer place than it really is. :(

See this http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1533674

If you toss out the GUI stuff and the boilerplate encryption algorithms, the amount of important code in TrueCrypt is fairly small. It has, naturally enough, been subjected to attempts to break it:

http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/security-management/2008/07/17/s...

Writing a sentence like "Some folks claim it has a backdoor" is painfully dishonest, manipulative, and scummy.

> If you toss out the GUI stuff and the boilerplate encryption algorithms, the amount of important code in TrueCrypt is fairly small.

First of all, even if you use "boilerplate" encryption algorithms, crypto is ridiculously easy to get wrong, especially in a very demanding setting of disk encryption. Second, TrueCrypt's ability to present its volumes as virtual drives/mountable images is no small feat (both in Linux and NT).

I can't speak for early 2009 when that article was published, but does any of this stand true today still?

They have a changelog here: http://www.truecrypt.org/docs/?s=version-history Their contact page says they're registered in the US and gives an address: http://www.truecrypt.org/contact

OK, can't speak for their forum banning as I'm not familiar with that situation and correct I cannot find any public repositories - but that's not too rare for some open source projects.

The reasons for being partially anonymous are pretty clear, I doubt various governments are a great fan of TrueCrypt especially with its plausible deniability.

Did you wonder why they have their address in that page as an image?

Apparently it is also near an air force base http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1533674

I made a question on Quora [1] for this in case anyone wants to contribute. I've seen alot of conflicting discussion on Hacker News as to the authenticity of TrueCrypt. Hopefully we can continue the dialogue and organize the response over there, as it may go beyond the scope of the discussion here, where it arguably only has a tenuous connection to amazon cloud storage or other web storage services.

[1] http://www.quora.com/Is-TrueCrypt-safe

While I agree that we should not blindly place trust in security tools and assume we are safe, this link [1] gives me some optimism about TC's security (if it is to be believed... that's the problem with paranoia).

[1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/28/brazil_banker_crypto...

Presumably, that would break the ability to stream to your mobile devices.

"Fully encrypted, with the key derived client-side from your username and password" is easier said than done. It means that the key is as weak as your password and that you need to download a special client or plug-in on every device you want to read your files from.

That key will almost certainly be cached and persisted on a device. Otherwise, you'd need to enter a password every time you need to decrypt a blob of data. That means you need some way to revoke a key when you lose a device. You'll also need some key recovery mechanism when users inevitably forget their password.

Sharing files effectively becomes a key distribution problem. Another consideration is that you can't just upload diffs of files when they change or easily perform data deduplication.

SpiderOak handles most of the above. So does Tarsnap, aside from the sharing. Neither do key recovery for lost passwords, as that defeats the entire purpose of having the key to begin with.

Amazon is going to be one of the biggest tech companies of the decade for growth and innovation. I'm going to invest tomorrow.

Amazon is the opposite of eBay. Seriously, I can not think of two companies farther apart on the innovation spectrum.

I'm kinda bemused at the idea that 5GB is enough for my music collection or even some reasonable portion of it. I mean think about it: who here really gets by with a 4GB (or even 8GB) MP3 player?

I'd probably need 200GB ($200/year). A more reasonable person would probably be fine with 20 or 50GB ($20/50 per year).

I'm not sure I understand the business model and the hype behind cloud syncing of music though. What is the point? If you're going to copy onto an MP3 player you'll need a local copy. So the use cases are:

1. On the Web;

2. On networked mobiles; and

3. As a form of backup.

Well (1) is covered quite well with Grooveshark. I can find most things I want there and it's an awful lot cheaper (up to free).

(2) I don't think makes a lot of sense given the high cost of mobile data. Maybe in the future mobile data will be an awful lot cheaper but there are fundamental limitations with wireless bandwidth that I think will make that very difficult.

There are many solutions for (3). In terms of raw storage, Amazon's prices are pretty cheap. But backup misses the point entirely I think.

When I buy digital content of any sort I don't want to back it up. I want to be able to recover it easily and simply. iTunes for example only allows downloading movies once (is that right?). If so, I'm just never going to buy movies that way. If I pay for it and can watch what I download any number of times, why can't I download it again if I accidentally lose it?

So iTunes and Amazon MP3s need this feature: log onto my account and click a link that says "download all purchased tracks".

At that point I don't need backup of any kind (for my digital content).

I think the only business model that makes sense is flat-rate subscriptions. You don't store your own music. The provider simply has all the music. This solves a lot of storage problems for the provider (meaning 1000 people share the same copy of the song rather than each uploading and storing it individually).

I can see how they'll get some scale here by having duplicates of some songs (particularly iTunes and Amazon bought MP3s). It'd be interesting to know how much saved space they have from deduplication.

Anyway, am I missing something here?

A more reasonable person would probably be fine with 20 or 50GB ($20/50 per year)

Depending on their phone they could probably just get a 32GB SD Card and carry their whole collection around with them.

I think Amazon is giving us another way do to it, not the best or only way to do it. I would probably put 5GB of my favorite music to listen to when I don't happen to have my iPod around...and continue to sync files on Dropbox.

> "Anyway, am I missing something here?"

At this point, it looks to me like Amazon is going to offer an Android device in the not-so-distant future. They're quite clearly following the Apple/iTunes/iPod strategy: "Get the software pieces out there and performing so integration with the final hardware is seamless and painless".

So the fact that it duplicates some parts of existing software doesn't much matter. What matters is whether it's a focused and refined first-party solution for that eventual device.

It simply isn't competing for the people who know about and downloaded and set up an account for Dropbox/Grooveshark/etc. It would be the built-in feature that's sitting there waiting for you, automatically integrated to your existing Amazon account and "Just Works".

Also, the small size seems (to me) to be a beta sort of limitation. I'd be surprised if the final hardware launch doesn't include an upgrade to 50 or more gig of space just for buying the hardware.

So, yes, it really is just a sort of Grooveshark/Dropbox/iTunes-Cloud-Sync sort of solution that doesn't knock anyone's socks off via the feature checklist. But if the integration with the final device is tight, I don't think that matters at all.

If you have 200GB of music, you have 195GB of crap.

Or you have really diverse music tastes and prefer lossless formats?

Well, all the songs you buy at amazon get stored for free. So that addresses some of the points you made. Since the storage gets upgraded to 20Gb after you buy an album it would be at least enough space for my music.

Offer details: http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/ref=amb_link_355524002...

Storage price still 12x more then traditional harddrive backup(1TB=1000$). That 12x is what you are paying for cloud value added service. Prices should be at least half in order for consumer market to take off.It will come.

In the mean time, still waiting for revamped MobileMe. An O/S integrated cloud service seems to me much way better than any others. Airdrop might be the interface for all filesharing solutions in MAC devices.

Dropbox feels very integrated though.

Dropbox will transparently sync a folder on your computer which makes it as integrated with the OS as your local file system. How much more integration do you need? Are there some system calls that the Darwin kernel could implement to make the integration tighter?

Why shall i need an app while its given a system feature?

BTW who knows what new OSX features will bring, new file system for better sync for air, a new pure friendly UI? Who knows...

And i don't like apps that depended some other major competitors than my environment.

"Oops, Adobe Flash Player is required to upload files"

Bye.

I didn't really notice it till I read this comment, but considering their long-available AWS Console is also a flash app, it makes sense, and it sure doesn't seem like that this is all the surprise to dropbox that people elsewhere on this thread are talking about.

Half the price of dropbox, this is just begging for a kick ass desktop/mobile app.

"Half the price of dropbox, this is just begging for a kick ass desktop/mobile app."

And I want a pony.

No client sync software, no sharing. I think the Dropbox folks will sleep well at night.

Smooth client software is half the value of paying for Dropbox and I don't see an Amazon side project challenging Dropbox in client usability anytime soon.

This looks more like a middle finger to any eventual iTunes cloud strategy.

I think one thing everybody should have learnt about Amazon is that they have perfected the MVP strategy. This is JUST ground-zero.

In the coming weeks/months, expect to see rapid iterations...i.e. I wouldn't be surprised if they announce a desktop-side client in relatively short order.

How on earth does a large company like Amazon manage to keep pushing out so many innovative products so frequently.

I suspect this is causing some disturbed sleep patterns at Dropbox, but you're right - without the "mounts as a folder and auto-syncs" behaviour that Dropbox has done so well, this isn't going to cut into their profit margins yet.

Right now, this is not super useful - those of us who always early-adopt stuff like this probably already have Zumodrive and Dropbox accounts, as well as our own S3 accounts. In it's current form, this is not quite as useful as Zumodrive, which I've stopped using because Dropbox works so much more nicely.

If I were the Dropbox people, I'd be busy keeping the development moving forward to make it even easier for non technical people to understand what they are and use it, to ensure Amazon are still behind when they finally catch up.

(I'd also consider seeing whether I could match Amazons "mp3's purchased thru Amazon are stored free" offer - I'll bet Amazon are doing that with some smart de-duping filesystem magic which means they only have to store one copy of the mp3 file. I wonder if Dropbox are big enough to be able to gain major wins from that too...)

As near as I can tell it only gives you free storage for MP3s purchased and explicitly downloaded to Cloud Drive /when purchased/. So there might not even be need for smart de-duping - their originals are probably stored in S3 as well.

Dropbox is on Amazon. You're paying for the kickass desktop/mobile app. Sure, I wish it was less, or that you could get more than 100GB…but this isn't a replacement.

One would hope this would prod DropBox into offering more fine grained pricing tiers and a sharing tier less than $700/month but I'm not going to hold my breath. The money they are pulling in now is too good to bother.

They are giving away 20gb for a $2 purchase

http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/?docId=1000667531

Only for a year and only for US customers.

Just have to remember this tidbit: "Unless you set your account to auto-renew to a paid plan, the 20 GB plan will revert to a free plan one year from the date of your MP3 album purchase." I'm pretty certain that Amazon will make sure to let you know well ahead of time. But I'm only "pretty certain", not "completely certain".

Hopefully they'll gracefully degrade like Dropbox does. They leave all your existing data there for you to access, but you can't add/change any files until you either renew or reduce your usage back down the free tier.

Also, another comment... Cloud Drive needs an API or client side mount support to really take off.

Yeah I was expecting that. Something that was more or less a drop-in replacement for Dropbox. Plus the bonus of streaming with Cloud Player. No doubt Amazon wanted to get it out there in the hands of customers and beat Apple and the WWDC. As long as they keep improving it in the next few months I don't think anyone will remember that they launched with a MVC.

I think it is still more expensive than Google to store photos and documents.

Google storage plans are almost a quarter of what Amazon is charging for! For 20GB you pay $20/yr and with Google it's just $5 (for 20GB). Have a look - https://www.google.com/accounts/PurchaseStorage

Am I missing something?

I cant remember for sure but i'm assuming you would use google docs to store any file you like? I seem to remember a while ago they opened google docs to any file.

Yes. That's right. Any kind of file with (obviously) no limit on bandwidth.

Out of curiosity, do you know of a local client or tool that can mount my Google storage locally? I/O to it is a serious PIA through the web interface compared to my smaller but easier to use Dropbox.

Actually I used one way back when Google didn't give an option to upload any type of file. I used Gmail drive (http://www.filehippo.com/download_gmail_drive/) which creates an actual drive on your computer where you can just put your files and it'll upload to Gmail as an attachment.

It's good for files upto 25MB (Gmail attachment size) and if you have inbox issues like me then it's not that a good option.

Then there's Gladinet Desktop app (paid) which I have no experience using, here's the link - http://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace/viewListing?pro...

Interesting, especially since Dropbox stores its files on Amazon's servers (S3).

Not for long I would bet.

S3 is a great service don't get me wrong. But for relatively low transaction data like backup and sync not only is the pricing high but Dropbox also have a vested interest that as they grow they do not depend on a 3rd party for what is no doubt the largest single cost of providing their service.

I guess it depends on whether Dropbox think they could implement the same storage service cheaper themselves. S3 actually offers a lot. They have at least four nines availability (and I think you can pay for more), a ridiculously high durability figure, plus geographic distribution and replication.

Developing that for yourself would be very expensive, I imagine. I'd actually be quite surprised if Dropbox went through the hassle of setting this all up. It would have to be a significant difference in cost to justify the effort.

Currently limited to a web interface and requiring the use of flash. No option for a basic uploader like Dropbox? I assume desktop clients will eventually arrive along with smartphone apps.

No doubt Amazon has the resources to compete with Dropbox. Can Dropbox fight back against such a Behemoth? Customer loyalty aside, what can Dropbox do to stay ahead of Amazon?

Can't wait to see how far this evolves.

As the cloud becomes increasingly more relevant as a reliable and scalable storage solution, this trend conjures memories of Sun's Net PC back in the 90s: http://news.cnet.com/DEMO-96-Net-PC-from-Sun-shines-at-show/...

If they let me upload and download files using an API instead of browser and all that CAPTCHA nonsense I would actually invest time and maybe some money to develop a native client for this service.

But considering the current experience of 'storing a file' I'm better off sending myself an email, let alone using Dropbox.

It would be very surprising to me if PaulG or anybody else at YC approved Dropbox's application without receiving what they believed to be a satisfactory answer to a question along the lines of "What happens when Amazon becomes your competition?"

If this product urges Dropbox to release the web api version 1, I'm happy.

That alone will put Dropbox in the top of the game if it's not already there, as tons of devs will rush to develop 3rd party apps for it.

The same doesn't apply to ACD, yet.

Until end-to-end bandwidth improves and per-terabyte prices drop significantly, I'll wait to move to the cloud. The value isn't yet there for me.

Anyone know of a drive that I can stream videos from?

Do not support files > 2GB in size. No go.

I am a happy Dropbox user and not planning to move away anytime soon. Amazon's expansion strategy is commendable though.

Being that dropbox uses amazon S3, I can't say I would expect them to be surprised at this.

How is this compared to SkyDrive?

CloudDrive is more overcast.

Superlative.

Awesome. I'll park my (encrypted) backups of docs there.

I feel like back in 1999 with this Amazon Cloud Storage/Player. Any case, Amazon is like a giant grocery store which is always selling something. It feel creepy to house my files at their store.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com