<story><title>AWS Snowcone</title><url>https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/introducing-aws-snowcone-small-lightweight-edge-storage-and-processing/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>aketchum</author><text>I must not interact with big enough data to understand, but what is the point of this?  I have watched&amp;#x2F;read several of the Snow product descriptions from AWS and I am still not quite sure I understand the point.&lt;p&gt;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?&lt;p&gt;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.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Twirrim</author><text>I can speak to part of the rationality around Snowball:&lt;p&gt;The old method of customers sending in hard disks and AWS importing them turned out to be _incredibly_ high touch.&lt;p&gt;* Customers would put the wrong labels on the wrong drives.  Given they were encrypted, and the label details were critical to matching the right disk with the right encryption key, that was a big issue.&lt;p&gt;* Imports would routinely fail due to all sorts of driver bugs both on the AWS side, and on the customer side.  The number of fringe NTFS quirks was phenomenal, let alone all the wide range of other formats that had to be handled&lt;p&gt;* Encryption tooling still really isn&amp;#x27;t all that user friendly.  Too many opportunities for mistakes.&lt;p&gt;* Drives would get damaged during shipping.&lt;p&gt;* Stuff would go missing in shipping.&lt;p&gt;It just didn&amp;#x27;t scale as a solution, and caused unending customer pain and frustration.&lt;p&gt;Snowball solves _all_ of that, by taking out of the equation almost anything about the process that customers could get wrong.  It handles all of the encryption stuff, is extremely ruggedised, has basic tracking.  The label is an e-ink display that automatically contains all the right information.  It becomes a &amp;quot;just works&amp;quot; solution.</text></comment>
<story><title>AWS Snowcone</title><url>https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/introducing-aws-snowcone-small-lightweight-edge-storage-and-processing/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>aketchum</author><text>I must not interact with big enough data to understand, but what is the point of this?  I have watched&amp;#x2F;read several of the Snow product descriptions from AWS and I am still not quite sure I understand the point.&lt;p&gt;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?&lt;p&gt;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.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>thoraway1010</author><text>Lots of potential uses:&lt;p&gt;Imagine Amazon was bidding on a big Department of Defense contract ($ in billion). DoD let&amp;#x27;s say wants to send drones &amp;#x2F; UAV&amp;#x27;s whatever to do big sensor passes out in far off areas &amp;#x2F; imagery, wideband radio etc). There is NO fast internet for the TB&amp;#x27;s generated. You pop this out of the drone, put it on the next resupply mail flight out, and ingest into Amazon cloud on far side for analytics.&lt;p&gt;Let&amp;#x27;s stay a store wants to collect 30 days of customer video related to all traffic in their 100 stores to do some sort of AI analysis on how folks use the stores. Again, some poorly paid store staff person can unplug this after a week and ship it off.&lt;p&gt;Let&amp;#x27;s say I generate data but instead of wanting to do a snowmobile every year, I want to do more granular moves. Again, I could do a weekly or whatever ship, and again from maybe a few locations.&lt;p&gt;I think especially in places with lower high speed internet penetration (africa, china etc) there is room for something &amp;quot;snackable&amp;quot; like this.&lt;p&gt;Let&amp;#x27;s say I distribute movies to movie theatres. Again, do a weekly ship in&amp;#x2F;out.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s $60&amp;#x2F;job. Not bad. No data IN fees.</text></comment>