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by aapeli
2189 days ago
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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. 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. |
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We're running a sort of sneakernet between our data collection agents and our data ingestion locations, each day each location receives 2-4 encrypted SSD's (Samsung T5) with up to 1TB of data. That then gets uploaded to our central location (overnight) for processing, and the next morning they're drained and ready for the next mission.
If Amazon had launched this earlier, and our cashflow (or funding :P) a bit better then maybe we'd have opted for running a constant stream of these snowcones to Amazon. Though processing costs are also a big concern, the cloud providers are at least twice as expensive as running metal, even when looking at 1 year paying for the hardware up front, and if you're cost sensitive when buying the hardware it could be 3-4 times cheaper than the managed cloud.
What I'd be afraid of with this server is losing them in the mail. I wonder if they've got a system where you could mirror two snowcones before you send one to them.