16 ms·

AWS Snowcone

478 points by jeffbarr 6y ago

jedieaston 6y ago
This is really cool. Is there documentation somewhere of what exactly the compute hardware looks like inside? 2 CPUs and 4GB of RAM, but is it x86 or ARM (I presume x86, but since it has to be on battery power..)? What size of EC2 instance can fit on there?
- txcwpalpha 6y ago
  From the link, instance types are: - snc1.micro, CPUs: 1, memory: 1 GiB - snc1.small, CPUs: 1, memory: 2 GiB - snc1.medium, CPUs: 2, memory: 4 GiB
  - benatkin 6y ago
    The table says CPUs, not vCPUs. Unless they're using single threaded single core processors, I think snc1.medium would equal either at least 4 vCPUs. I don't think they use the term vCPU for Snowcone so in reality it has zero vCPUs. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/instance-optimize-cpu.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/instance...
    - txcwpalpha 6y ago
      Oops, you're right. I'll fix my comment.
  - jedieaston 6y ago
    Whoops, missed that entirely. Thanks!
lukevp 6y ago
Is this the beginning of mini self-hosted clouds where the orchestration happens in a web UI but the compute/storage is local? Like a cheap version of Azure Stack? I get that you can’t keep the snowcone, but if you could, it would be a little VM host with local storage on your LAN that could let you run everything internal.
- ceejayoz 6y ago
  It looks like you can keep the Snowcone. One of the screenshots offers this option: > "Perform local compute and storage workloads, without transferring data. You can order multiple devices in a cluster for increased durability and storage capacity."
  - wmf 6y ago
    At $6/day it's fairly expensive for non-temporary workloads.
    - E5JBK7UJPT 6y ago
      Or you could pay the $2,000 lost device fee.
      - notatoad 6y ago
        I'm guessing the devices marked as lost don't continue to function (at least not once they connect to the internet again)
    - jon-wood 6y ago
      They have a pricing example for this use case which includes the following caveat: > First, you should contact AWS Sales to discuss private pricing for the long-term AWS Snowcone deployment
- jjeaff 6y ago
  I can't imagine that becoming more popular than just a drobo style device that runs its own software. Seems ridiculous to make your local hardware dependent on the cloud. (obviously this is common for iot devices but it seems that anything like this for enterprise or prosumer doesn't usually fly.
- anaganisk 6y ago
  Has no one heard of NAS devices that can run docker containers? Synology Play?
wiredfool 6y ago
Tactical edge computing?
- pmorici 6y ago
  They market this stuff aggressively to the government as a military IT solution.
- ryanmarsh 6y ago
  Computers and software are essential to ISR, mission planning, and personnel. Starlink will help with this, but sat data connections (IME) are perpetually saturated.
perrohunter 6y ago
What’s the price ?
- notatoad 6y ago
  https://aws.amazon.com/snowcone/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/snowcone/pricing/
- mentat 6y ago
  $60 + $6 per day after 5 days. It adds up, examples at bottom: https://aws.amazon.com/snowcone/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/snowcone/pricing/
jackklika 6y ago
I think that local storage of personal data ("data most important to you") will be a huge trend in the next few years for both homes and offices, especially if they can back up data to other trusted devices (in other homes and offices of trusted people). As always the problem is going to be usability - the AWS ecosystem is not friendly to non-techies.
- laurentdc 6y ago
  I don't mean to sound snarky but isn't "local storage of personal data" what off the shelf NAS devices (QNAP, Synology, WD..) have been doing for almost two decades? Even the backup thing, last time I tried they all had some pretty simple UI built around a rsync fork
  - jackklika 6y ago
    I was thinking more having a "personal cloud" between trusted connected devices at different sites.
    - Spivak 6y ago
      Being able to buy/rent an AWS outpost of this size for home use would actually be pretty neat.
- notatoad 6y ago
  > the AWS ecosystem is not friendly to non-techies. nor is it supposed to be. AWS is tools to build end-consumer products, not an actual end-consumer product itself.
- Aperocky 6y ago
  I actually think it's not so unfriendly. I have a stock trader friend who keeps all of his transaction records in S3 buckets, and he's not a 'techie'. It's akin to having an understanding in file system - just that it's in the cloud this time. I'm sure a lot of non-techie understand enough about file systems to work what they needed it to do. And the same goes for the cloud.
aketchum 6y ago
I must not interact with big enough data to understand, but what is the point of this? I have watched/read several of the Snow product descriptions from AWS and I am still not quite sure I understand the point. 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? 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.
- Gaelan 6y ago
  I don't get this one, but for the larger Snow products, yeah, it's for transferring data too large to realistically sending over the internet.
- txcwpalpha 6y ago
  I'm with you. I think this is really cool but I have a hard time finding a use case for it. The use case for the other Snow products (Snowball, Snowmobile) are clearer, as they are for transferring petabytes of data to/from AWS without having to use slow internet connections. Snowcone could be used for this indeed, but at only 8 TB, the value proposition seems a lot less. Personally, I'd probably just suffer through having to spend a week doing a slow internet upload/download rather than paying for Snowcone. Also, the articles talks multiple times about using Snowcone to upload the data for you, over your own internet connection. Why would I pay for Snowcone to do that when I could just upload directly to S3, without using Snowcone as the middle layer, and get the same speeds? The compute aspect of it seems cool from a "im a tech enthusiast and this is cool" perspective, similar to how a Raspberry Pi is cool, but I don't see the real-world use case for hosting compute workloads on a rented Raspberry Pi. I would just buy a Raspberry Pi instead for cheaper. What this does make me interested in is something like this, but purchaseable outright without renting, a la AWS Outposts but the size of the Snowcone. It would be cool to have a swarm of Raspberry Pi sized devices that I controlled entirely through the AWS console with AWS services, and it would open up some niche use cases like having a tiny server cluster in places where I otherwise wouldn't have infrastructure, like a remote research camp or rural community.
rattray 6y ago
Interesting. So you can launch an EC2 instance with 8TB storage in your closet, or handbag, or under the desk at your medical facility, or whatever. I gotta say, sounds kinda fun. Maybe would be handy for serving video content etc on a local network? Or if you have a network of video cameras not connected to the internet, use this for daily/weekly collection of recorded content?
- imhoguy 6y ago
  What you describe is NAS. Popular brands give enough resources to run VMs, Docker containers, even perform 4K transcoding etc.
- anaganisk 6y ago
  Take look at Synology devices.
divbzero 6y ago
AWS Snowcone pricing here: https://aws.amazon.com/snowcone/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/snowcone/pricing/
- speedgoose 6y ago
  It's definitely not cheap. As always with AWS.
- AndrewDucker 6y ago
  $60 to get 8TB into AWS is pretty good. Unless you have incredible upload speeds it's massively faster than uploading that much data.
- joncp 6y ago
  Hmm. A $2,000 loss fee. I sure hope they don't use Amazon delivery. They'll deliver stuff to other houses, complete with a "delivery proof" picture of the wrong house and claim that you must have lost it.
  - ShakataGaNai 6y ago
    Ironically you'll notice all the pictures of the snow-family devices have UPS labels. EX https://media.amazonwebservices.com/blog/2020/snow_luna_1.jpg https://media.amazonwebservices.com/blog/2020/snow_luna_1.jp... and https://www.slideshare.net/AmazonWebServices/new-launch-introducing-aws-snowball-edge-and-aws-snowmobile https://www.slideshare.net/AmazonWebServices/new-launch-intr...
deleted 6y ago
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akersten 6y ago
This must be where all the traded-in Kindle screens are going. I was surprised Amazon was willing to pay me $25 for my 7-year-old Kindle, but I guess it's cheaper than manufacturing new eInk displays. Maybe I'm a germophobe, but isn't it kind of gross that this thing is shipped in no container and then put on your desk?
- jayd16 6y ago
  Is it dishwasher safe?
  - sbierwagen 6y ago
    The water in a dishwasher can get up to 60C, which is above the maximum storage temperature of most consumer electronics.
- reaperducer 6y ago
  Maybe I'm a germophobe, but isn't it kind of gross that this thing is shipped in no container and then put on your desk? How long do germs last on an e-ink display? I know on paper and cardboard and such it's not very long. From what I can remember, they die while still in the mail stream. If you're concerned, hit it with some Lysol or soap and water.
  - txcwpalpha 6y ago
    I think parent commenter isn't just worried about the e-ink display, but the general fact that the entire device itself is going to be sitting in dirty shipping containers, warehouses, trucks, etc without any kind of covering. I know I've gotten some shipments before that have stains of who-knows-what-liquid soaked into the cardboard. I'm not a germophobe, but even so, this probably isn't a device you want to be handling while also eating a sandwich. Lysoling it is probably wise.
    - stepstop 6y ago
      I’m a germaphobe but it’s probably not worse than say reading a postcard, or putting your laptop in an airport bin, or your backpack under an airliner seat where people put their feet
t0mas88 6y ago
Interesting at the very least for retrieval of backups from S3 Deep Glacier. Because the Glacier retrieval fees with bulk transfer are only 0.003 (yes 0.3 cent, not 3 cent) per GB. The thing that kills the backup use-case is $ 0.09 per GB bandwidth costs to the internet. The Snowcone brings that down to $ ~0.037 + shipping if you use the full 8TB per device. And that includes a $ 0.03 bandwidth fee from S3 tot Snowcone that I guess they're going to reduce over time since it's all on their internal network.
yingw787 6y ago
This is nice! I want a homelab for my data, but I like AWS. It'd be cool to run my own personal database on this, and only run pg_backup to S3. RDS is too expensive for personal projects, but I'm not sure if free Heroku dynos and such aren't enough for raw data processing. So yeah, I guess if AWS had tiny RDS with primary node as Snowcone, I'd buy one. Otherwise I might buy one later and install my own database on it. Not sure where AWS is going with this, but I'd like to see AWS offer a tiny version of AWS Outposts, where you can get any kind of AWS service in a box.
- jchrisa 6y ago
  My thoughts exactly. Seems like a great way to have a local DynamoDB for the team to collaborate with. I wonder how strong the sync to cloud story is.
jrockway 6y ago
I have no opinion on the necessity of this product (sucks that 100Gbps networks are still confined to datacenters), but did they reuse a backlight Kindle display for the screen that becomes the shipping label? That's neat, I love it when people take advantage of things other parts of their company did.
- Frost1x 6y ago
  That's the part that I thought was truly creative. What happens when the eink display is damaged or stops working during shipping though? I'm presuming if dynamic shipping labels like this ever become common, shipping companies will need their own independent identifier or a standardized physical identifier they can use to pull up shipping information from should such a case occur.
  - Corrado 6y ago
    I'm guessing that shipping companies have some procedures in place today for dealing with packages with damaged labels. Even paper labels can be ripped, scarred, or otherwise damaged beyond a readable state.
mperham 6y ago
Sort of EC2/EBS in a local NAS device? Interesting.
cornellwright 6y ago
I'd love to see an "expedited import" option for this, where the device gets shipped to an AWS facility right near the carrier overnight hub and imported into S3 that night, landing in S3 by ~2am and able to be processed and delivered to customers before they get to work the next morning. For many remote data collection activities this could remove the need for expensive and long lead fiber installation.
sebringj 6y ago
Is this used for AI type scenarios as a data buffer to s3?
ryanmarsh 6y ago
This is pure (wild) speculation given my experience with data needs that seem to fit the product. I bet one (the) customer profile for this was military or intelligence (before it was available to the public). I say this given AWS prior gov/cia work. Securely capturing, transferring, and maintaining chain of custody for intel from various media and devices captured during raids or other activities was (several years ago) a total shit show. We had a closet full of trash bags from various raids. The analysts weren’t in the field, the op tempo and slow data rates prevented us from making good use of most of the data. Some of which was time sensitive (we would find out weeks later). Also some of the data captured was to be used as evidence in the host nation legal system (I don’t know if that ever happened) or (presumably) GITMO. I was just a grunt at the time, and this was a long time ago but I bet the problem still exists.
thenoblesunfish 6y ago
Didn't I see this on "Silicon Valley"?
- eeZah7Ux 6y ago
  This could fit into the SV show very well: "we invented on premise cloud" "you mean It's just a small server?" "no no it's like having a bit of cloud in your home"
- DevMois 6y ago
  Bezos signature edition coming soon
orthecreedence 6y ago
I see this and think "oh look, a surveillance company made another spy device they want me to buy and put in my home."
- zelly 6y ago
  It's a RasPi that glows in the dark
est31 6y ago
So you need to have Windows or Mac OS in order to use this? No love for Linux? https://aws.amazon.com/en/snowcone/resources/ https://aws.amazon.com/en/snowcone/resources/
- duskwuff 6y ago
  If you're on Linux, you're probably perfectly happy to use the `aws` command-line tools. No need for fancy graphics. :)
  - est31 6y ago
    Didn't know they supported it as well. Thanks!
deleted 6y ago
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N_A_T_E 6y ago
All of this makes sense to me, except I have no idea how they fit 100tb of capacity in a box that small. Aren't HDDs maxing out around 16TB these days? They couldn't fit 6 drives in there.
- luhn 6y ago
  Not sure where you're seeing 100TB? > AWS Snowcone weighs 4.5 pounds and includes 8 terabytes of usable storage
  - Dylan16807 6y ago
    Which makes it interesting in the other direction. If this box is worth two hundred dollars a month and two thousand dollars upon loss, why not put in a drive twice as big for an extra $200?
- banana_giraffe 6y ago
  You can fit 100tb in a Snowball, not the Snowcone, which maxes out at 8tb. Having dealt with a few Snowballs from time to time, there is zero doubt they have space in those things for 100tb. They're not small or lightweight devices. I'm super happy to see this device. It fills a niche a lot of my work falls into nicely.
- teraflop 6y ago
  If they really wanted to fit 100TB in a box that size, they could probably do it with flash. It would just be ludicrously expensive.
- bithaze 6y ago
  I was curious about this too, but going back now to take a closer look at that screenshot, those are three other Snowball models listed in the table, not three more Snowcone models.
pmorici 6y ago
Here is what I don't get about this product line. The docs say the encryption is done on the attached workstation. Which means your network transfer speed is going to be limited if you don't have a pretty high end machine with at least AESNI. What is the point of having the processor and all that in the device itself if you end up needing a high end workstation anyways to get the maximum performance out of the thing?
- jon-wood 6y ago
  It’s a trade off between speed and security, and my assumption is that they’ve chosen to do it this way so that the encryption key isn’t sitting on the device during transit. By doing it this way even if someone can intercept data while it’s being shipped between the customer and AWS all they’re going to get is a disk full of random bytes.
  - pmorici 6y ago
    The device doesn't need to store the key to do the encryption. It can be given the key when you boot it and then clear it before shipment.
ryanisnan 6y ago
Hey Jeff, curious what the battery life of this device is? I'm on a team that has a need for remote compute power, but getting to our devices on anything more frequent than a monthly basis is sometimes a challenge.
- ryanisnan 6y ago
  Answered my own question! Thanks for posting! Has some cool applications for sure, but too much draw for set it and forget type of operations.
  - rcar 6y ago
    On behalf of future searchers trying to avoid the "nvm I figured it out" problem, what was the answer?
- qchris 6y ago
  My team also may be looking for something with similar requirements in the near future, do you have any recommendations for solutions that you're considering? I know a number of earth science researchers that have mentioned ideas that would really benefit from that sort thing as well.
- re 6y ago
  It sounds like the device does not have an internal battery so it depends on the capacity of the battery that you attach to it. https://aws.amazon.com/snowcone/features/ https://aws.amazon.com/snowcone/features/ > For a light workload at 25% CPU usage, the device can run on a 65 W battery for approximately 6 hours. The docs are a little inconsistent on wattage requirement. The feature page above says "60 W+ (20 V) USB-C power adapters", but in the docs: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/snowball/latest/snowcone-guide/snowcone-spec-requirements.html#snowcone-power-supply https://docs.aws.amazon.com/snowball/latest/snowcone-guide/s... > any USB-C power adapter that is rated for 45W+
awsgeek 6y ago
My AWS Snow Family visual notes: https://www.awsgeek.com/AWS-Snow-Family/ https://www.awsgeek.com/AWS-Snow-Family/
- roboyoshi 6y ago
  neat. what do you use for drawing those diagrams?
  - TkTech 6y ago
    Looks like Notability - https://github.com/AwsGeek/visualnotes https://github.com/AwsGeek/visualnotes
tdstein 6y ago
The 21st century's pneumatic tube!
rewsiffer 6y ago
Anyone know what the FCC ID is? I would love to see the FCC application teardown but can't find the FCC ID anywhere.
- pmorici 6y ago
  I doubt it has it's own FCC ID. It probably uses an off the shelf wifi card to avoid having to do FCC testing.
nevir 6y ago
I'm not sure whether I'm more annoyed by AWS' product naming scheme or the JS/Ruby/etc community's cutsy project names
- divbzero 6y ago
  I sometimes wonder if AWS product naming is driven by more than just cuteness or habit. Obscure names and acronyms could be an intentional strategy to tie users to AWS.
mmastrac 6y ago
What happened to the Google/AWS services where you could ship a raw HDD? It seems like they've both retired that service in favour of more expensive custom hardware.
- robocat 6y ago
  The HDD solution was problematic according to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23554752 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23554752
aapeli 6y ago
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.
- JshWright 6y ago
  Throw a red LED on top and it's literally "the internet" from The IT Crowd
- eof 6y ago
  I don't think that's a very realistic outlook. Most money spent in aws is not by noobs going over their free tier not realizing they could have bought a raspberry pi; it's by institutions that are paying for convenience and know it.
- abri 6y ago
  if they don't do it, someone else will
- tinco 6y ago
  One of the main reasons that we're running our own hardware is because it's difficult and cost prohibitive for us to get our data to a cloud provider. 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.
claytoneast 6y ago
The e-ink display part triggers thoughts of an Amazon of the future that uses entirely reusable boxes to ship things to consumers. Hard plastic containers w/ e-ink labels. Boom, no more millions (billions? trillions?) of cardboard/plastic boxes used to enclose packages. Still millions/billions/trillions of boxes/plastic packaging for the items themselves, but at least the transit envelope would be reusable.
- fuball63 6y ago
  That's a cool idea. I wonder how many re-uses a box like that would take to make it cost effective over the same amount of cardboard. Should be feasible I'd think.
  - jayd16 6y ago
    If the cost to return the box is more than a cardboard box, its not feasible.
    - CobrastanJorji 6y ago
      Not necessarily. If the box costs 10 times as much, but they come up with a way to use the box 12 times, it was worth it. That won't work if the recipient doesn't have a need to mail something back, but for a use case where you expected most boxes would be shipped back (maybe a phone repair company?), it could absolutely make sense.
      - Dylan16807 6y ago
        The post you're saying "not necessarily" to has nothing to do with the cost of the box itself. If returning it costs too much, the box could be free and you'd lose money.
        jcims 6y ago
        Just make it up in volume! ;)
zelly 6y ago
"raspberry pi but with NSA"
simias 6y ago
It's very tangential but what is the device shown next to the drive in the first picture? https://media.amazonwebservices.com/blog/2020/snowcone_jb_sticker_1.jpg https://media.amazonwebservices.com/blog/2020/snowcone_jb_st... I assumed it was here to give a sense of the relative size of the drive, but after staring at this picture for two minutes I genuinely have no idea what it is. Actually at first I even wondered if that was the drive, since it's vaguely more in the shape of a snowcone than the drive itself.
- Elof 6y ago
  I believe that's a water bottle
- supakeen 6y ago
  Thermos bottle for keeping drinks cold or warm.
- aka1234 6y ago
  It's a water bottle
- ckosidows 6y ago
  Water bottle or thermos?
- Whiteshadow12 6y ago
  I thought the same thing, to my embarrassment.
lai 6y ago
At first I thought it was the bottle.
phant0mas 6y ago
Something related from my previous job, for data storage there's Serverpack 35 from Acromove. 120 TB per box, suitcase form factor, includes tracking and remote control. You seal it and you load it in courier car. https://acromove.com/products/serverpack-35/ https://acromove.com/products/serverpack-35/ They also have Serverpack Edge which is supposed to do the same.
tibbon 6y ago
Wow, this could be awesome for running operation teams at Burning Man! (Seriously, at the moment, some teams literally offline their server and physically take it to the playa to run there instead of figuring out connectivity there. Very little of it's using newer tech)
deviation 6y ago
Seems relatively risk-adverse. Glad they're providing more variety to their data transferral services, but this really does seem like an extremely niche system that not many companies will fully utilise.
deviantflux 6y ago
Life imitates art https://youtu.be/iDbyYGrswtg https://youtu.be/iDbyYGrswtg
mwcampbell 6y ago
> The AMIs must be made from an instance launched from a CentOS or Ubuntu product in AWS Marketplace I wonder what's special about these images.
adamcharnock 6y ago
I'm in the process of starting an ISP right now, so I've just been getting prices for dedicated fibre lines. So let's do some quick math. A 1Gbps dedicated (uncontended) fibre line in Europe seems to be in the region of $/€/£600 per month. How much data can one push on that per day (assuming 1Gbit/s = 100Mb/s real world)? In one day: 100 * 60 * 60 * 24 = 8.64Tb So call it one snowcone per day. So you could in theory send 30 snowcones a month, a total snowcone value of $60*30 = $1800. However, at $60/snowcone, you would have to send 10 snowcones per month before your own dedicated line breaks even. So yeah, if you're sending 10 or more per month, every month, consider getting a dedicated line. But that seems like an unusual use case to me. There's also a bunch of organisational reasons to use something like snowcone, I'm sure.
aladine 6y ago
At the first glance, I thought Amazon ship Kindle to customer with storage as a bonus.
code4tee 6y ago
Just think of all the “snow” products as a modern version of sneaker net (it used to be faster to run down the hall with a disk than transfer files over the network because networks used to be really slow). The snow products solve the same issues. Despite fiber connections and such it just doesn’t make sense to transfer massive volumes of data over the network. It’s often literally faster and cheaper to ship a box of hard drives via UPS or FedEx. Snowball was for big sets of files and is the size of a suitcase. Snowmobile is for petabyte scale and is literally a tractor trailer full of disks. The use case here seems to be more towards remote situations with smaller data. You have something that collects a lot of data and need to get that into your cloud. Instead of running around with a bunch if portable hard drives and then having someone transfer the data manually to S3 over the internet you just dump your data into the snowcone and hand it to your local UPS guy and let AWS take care of the rest. Lots of remote data collection devices and such would fit into that model. Clearly the use case is rather specific but for people in the business of collecting data on stuff and then needing to get it into the cloud this is actually a nifty little device.
peterwwillis 6y ago
Oh, fun! When a good Chinese manufacturer duplicates the form factor, someone can ship clones of these laden with malware for spear-phishing attacks on corporate, industrial, and classified networks. > I connect the Snowcone to the power supply and to my network, and power up! After a few seconds of initialization, the device shows its IP address and invites me to connect: With a convincing e-Ink display, and an unusually long delay, you've probably got a good 10 minutes on this local network to 0-day your way into routers and client machines. > Next, I download AWS OpsHub for Snow Family, install it, and then configure it to access the device. I select Snowcone and click Next: By this point you make the device self-brick and print out an error about how it needs to be sent back to Amazon for repairs, due to being banged up during shipping. Extra scuffs or dents in the case will sell this. While the replacement is ordered, use your now client-resident malware to exfiltrate data as you like, since you know there's data worth them copying offline. Or trojan up every data format you see so that after the data is moved out via a working Snowball you can eventually find an internet-connected device to exfiltrate with.
- a1a1a1a1a1a1 6y ago
  This seems like a legitimate concern. I didn't see any indication that the snowcone presented a code that would be verified through the aws opshub application, or a similar operation. Is this happening behind the scenes, maybe in the manifest file you upload? If this was swapped in shipping it could potentially just work as expected while exfiltrating data whenever it could connect to the internet, potentially through builtin lte, etc.
- lewis1028282 6y ago
  Isn't that the same with any hardware you get? Someone could intercept your server from Dell and put malware on it.
totetsu 6y ago
Is there any open hardware equivalent to this? I can see it being very useful for crowdsourced archiving projects.
anonymousiam 6y ago
Capitalizing on the fact that sneakernet is still faster than Internet.
dmix 6y ago
It's funny hearing Amazon Polly trying to pronounce "vCPUs" like "vee-pus".
canthonytucci 6y ago
I tried to use Snowball as part of a customer facing solution, but the lack of predictability around turnaround times made it impossible for me to justify the expense and overhead. It is an awesome box and an awesome solution to a real life problem. I really wanted to love snowball. I was not filling them all the way up by any means, so the turnaround had to be fast enough for me to justify it over just uploading to s3 over slowish connections. The interface in the console was very opaque and gave no information about when the boxes would get shipped out. I had weeks long delays with zero contact when the box types I wanted were out of stock and only found out that was the cause when I cried to support. I also had boxes stall at the import stage after they had already been shipped back. The software to transfer was also just ok. I think with more love this can be a great tool, but there are some things that could make it better.

478 points by jeffbarr 6y ago

This is really cool. Is there documentation somewhere of what exactly the compute hardware looks like inside? 2 CPUs and 4GB of RAM, but is it x86 or ARM (I presume x86, but since it has to be on battery power..)? What size of EC2 instance can fit on there?

txcwpalpha 6y ago
From the link, instance types are: - snc1.micro, CPUs: 1, memory: 1 GiB - snc1.small, CPUs: 1, memory: 2 GiB - snc1.medium, CPUs: 2, memory: 4 GiB
- benatkin 6y ago
  The table says CPUs, not vCPUs. Unless they're using single threaded single core processors, I think snc1.medium would equal either at least 4 vCPUs. I don't think they use the term vCPU for Snowcone so in reality it has zero vCPUs. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/instance-optimize-cpu.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/instance...
  - txcwpalpha 6y ago
    Oops, you're right. I'll fix my comment.
- jedieaston 6y ago
  Whoops, missed that entirely. Thanks!

lukevp 6y ago

Is this the beginning of mini self-hosted clouds where the orchestration happens in a web UI but the compute/storage is local? Like a cheap version of Azure Stack? I get that you can’t keep the snowcone, but if you could, it would be a little VM host with local storage on your LAN that could let you run everything internal.

ceejayoz 6y ago
It looks like you can keep the Snowcone. One of the screenshots offers this option: > "Perform local compute and storage workloads, without transferring data. You can order multiple devices in a cluster for increased durability and storage capacity."
- wmf 6y ago
  At $6/day it's fairly expensive for non-temporary workloads.
  - E5JBK7UJPT 6y ago
    Or you could pay the $2,000 lost device fee.
    - notatoad 6y ago
      I'm guessing the devices marked as lost don't continue to function (at least not once they connect to the internet again)
  - jon-wood 6y ago
    They have a pricing example for this use case which includes the following caveat: > First, you should contact AWS Sales to discuss private pricing for the long-term AWS Snowcone deployment
jjeaff 6y ago
I can't imagine that becoming more popular than just a drobo style device that runs its own software. Seems ridiculous to make your local hardware dependent on the cloud. (obviously this is common for iot devices but it seems that anything like this for enterprise or prosumer doesn't usually fly.
anaganisk 6y ago
Has no one heard of NAS devices that can run docker containers? Synology Play?

wiredfool 6y ago

Tactical edge computing?

pmorici 6y ago
They market this stuff aggressively to the government as a military IT solution.
ryanmarsh 6y ago
Computers and software are essential to ISR, mission planning, and personnel. Starlink will help with this, but sat data connections (IME) are perpetually saturated.

perrohunter 6y ago

What’s the price ?

notatoad 6y ago
https://aws.amazon.com/snowcone/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/snowcone/pricing/
mentat 6y ago
$60 + $6 per day after 5 days. It adds up, examples at bottom: https://aws.amazon.com/snowcone/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/snowcone/pricing/

jackklika 6y ago

I think that local storage of personal data ("data most important to you") will be a huge trend in the next few years for both homes and offices, especially if they can back up data to other trusted devices (in other homes and offices of trusted people). As always the problem is going to be usability - the AWS ecosystem is not friendly to non-techies.

laurentdc 6y ago
I don't mean to sound snarky but isn't "local storage of personal data" what off the shelf NAS devices (QNAP, Synology, WD..) have been doing for almost two decades? Even the backup thing, last time I tried they all had some pretty simple UI built around a rsync fork
- jackklika 6y ago
  I was thinking more having a "personal cloud" between trusted connected devices at different sites.
  - Spivak 6y ago
    Being able to buy/rent an AWS outpost of this size for home use would actually be pretty neat.
notatoad 6y ago
> the AWS ecosystem is not friendly to non-techies. nor is it supposed to be. AWS is tools to build end-consumer products, not an actual end-consumer product itself.
Aperocky 6y ago
I actually think it's not so unfriendly. I have a stock trader friend who keeps all of his transaction records in S3 buckets, and he's not a 'techie'. It's akin to having an understanding in file system - just that it's in the cloud this time. I'm sure a lot of non-techie understand enough about file systems to work what they needed it to do. And the same goes for the cloud.

aketchum 6y ago

I must not interact with big enough data to understand, but what is the point of this? I have watched/read several of the Snow product descriptions from AWS and I am still not quite sure I understand the point. 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? 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.

Gaelan 6y ago
I don't get this one, but for the larger Snow products, yeah, it's for transferring data too large to realistically sending over the internet.
txcwpalpha 6y ago
I'm with you. I think this is really cool but I have a hard time finding a use case for it. The use case for the other Snow products (Snowball, Snowmobile) are clearer, as they are for transferring petabytes of data to/from AWS without having to use slow internet connections. Snowcone could be used for this indeed, but at only 8 TB, the value proposition seems a lot less. Personally, I'd probably just suffer through having to spend a week doing a slow internet upload/download rather than paying for Snowcone. Also, the articles talks multiple times about using Snowcone to upload the data for you, over your own internet connection. Why would I pay for Snowcone to do that when I could just upload directly to S3, without using Snowcone as the middle layer, and get the same speeds? The compute aspect of it seems cool from a "im a tech enthusiast and this is cool" perspective, similar to how a Raspberry Pi is cool, but I don't see the real-world use case for hosting compute workloads on a rented Raspberry Pi. I would just buy a Raspberry Pi instead for cheaper. What this does make me interested in is something like this, but purchaseable outright without renting, a la AWS Outposts but the size of the Snowcone. It would be cool to have a swarm of Raspberry Pi sized devices that I controlled entirely through the AWS console with AWS services, and it would open up some niche use cases like having a tiny server cluster in places where I otherwise wouldn't have infrastructure, like a remote research camp or rural community.

rattray 6y ago

Interesting. So you can launch an EC2 instance with 8TB storage in your closet, or handbag, or under the desk at your medical facility, or whatever. I gotta say, sounds kinda fun. Maybe would be handy for serving video content etc on a local network? Or if you have a network of video cameras not connected to the internet, use this for daily/weekly collection of recorded content?

imhoguy 6y ago
What you describe is NAS. Popular brands give enough resources to run VMs, Docker containers, even perform 4K transcoding etc.
anaganisk 6y ago
Take look at Synology devices.

divbzero 6y ago

AWS Snowcone pricing here: https://aws.amazon.com/snowcone/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/snowcone/pricing/

speedgoose 6y ago
It's definitely not cheap. As always with AWS.
AndrewDucker 6y ago
$60 to get 8TB into AWS is pretty good. Unless you have incredible upload speeds it's massively faster than uploading that much data.
joncp 6y ago
Hmm. A $2,000 loss fee. I sure hope they don't use Amazon delivery. They'll deliver stuff to other houses, complete with a "delivery proof" picture of the wrong house and claim that you must have lost it.
- ShakataGaNai 6y ago
  Ironically you'll notice all the pictures of the snow-family devices have UPS labels. EX https://media.amazonwebservices.com/blog/2020/snow_luna_1.jpg https://media.amazonwebservices.com/blog/2020/snow_luna_1.jp... and https://www.slideshare.net/AmazonWebServices/new-launch-introducing-aws-snowball-edge-and-aws-snowmobile https://www.slideshare.net/AmazonWebServices/new-launch-intr...

deleted 6y ago

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akersten 6y ago

This must be where all the traded-in Kindle screens are going. I was surprised Amazon was willing to pay me $25 for my 7-year-old Kindle, but I guess it's cheaper than manufacturing new eInk displays. Maybe I'm a germophobe, but isn't it kind of gross that this thing is shipped in no container and then put on your desk?

jayd16 6y ago
Is it dishwasher safe?
- sbierwagen 6y ago
  The water in a dishwasher can get up to 60C, which is above the maximum storage temperature of most consumer electronics.
reaperducer 6y ago
Maybe I'm a germophobe, but isn't it kind of gross that this thing is shipped in no container and then put on your desk? How long do germs last on an e-ink display? I know on paper and cardboard and such it's not very long. From what I can remember, they die while still in the mail stream. If you're concerned, hit it with some Lysol or soap and water.
- txcwpalpha 6y ago
  I think parent commenter isn't just worried about the e-ink display, but the general fact that the entire device itself is going to be sitting in dirty shipping containers, warehouses, trucks, etc without any kind of covering. I know I've gotten some shipments before that have stains of who-knows-what-liquid soaked into the cardboard. I'm not a germophobe, but even so, this probably isn't a device you want to be handling while also eating a sandwich. Lysoling it is probably wise.
  - stepstop 6y ago
    I’m a germaphobe but it’s probably not worse than say reading a postcard, or putting your laptop in an airport bin, or your backpack under an airliner seat where people put their feet

t0mas88 6y ago

Interesting at the very least for retrieval of backups from S3 Deep Glacier. Because the Glacier retrieval fees with bulk transfer are only 0.003 (yes 0.3 cent, not 3 cent) per GB. The thing that kills the backup use-case is $ 0.09 per GB bandwidth costs to the internet. The Snowcone brings that down to $ ~0.037 + shipping if you use the full 8TB per device. And that includes a $ 0.03 bandwidth fee from S3 tot Snowcone that I guess they're going to reduce over time since it's all on their internal network.

yingw787 6y ago

This is nice! I want a homelab for my data, but I like AWS. It'd be cool to run my own personal database on this, and only run pg_backup to S3. RDS is too expensive for personal projects, but I'm not sure if free Heroku dynos and such aren't enough for raw data processing. So yeah, I guess if AWS had tiny RDS with primary node as Snowcone, I'd buy one. Otherwise I might buy one later and install my own database on it. Not sure where AWS is going with this, but I'd like to see AWS offer a tiny version of AWS Outposts, where you can get any kind of AWS service in a box.

jchrisa 6y ago
My thoughts exactly. Seems like a great way to have a local DynamoDB for the team to collaborate with. I wonder how strong the sync to cloud story is.

jrockway 6y ago

I have no opinion on the necessity of this product (sucks that 100Gbps networks are still confined to datacenters), but did they reuse a backlight Kindle display for the screen that becomes the shipping label? That's neat, I love it when people take advantage of things other parts of their company did.

Frost1x 6y ago
That's the part that I thought was truly creative. What happens when the eink display is damaged or stops working during shipping though? I'm presuming if dynamic shipping labels like this ever become common, shipping companies will need their own independent identifier or a standardized physical identifier they can use to pull up shipping information from should such a case occur.
- Corrado 6y ago
  I'm guessing that shipping companies have some procedures in place today for dealing with packages with damaged labels. Even paper labels can be ripped, scarred, or otherwise damaged beyond a readable state.

mperham 6y ago

Sort of EC2/EBS in a local NAS device? Interesting.

cornellwright 6y ago

I'd love to see an "expedited import" option for this, where the device gets shipped to an AWS facility right near the carrier overnight hub and imported into S3 that night, landing in S3 by ~2am and able to be processed and delivered to customers before they get to work the next morning. For many remote data collection activities this could remove the need for expensive and long lead fiber installation.

sebringj 6y ago

Is this used for AI type scenarios as a data buffer to s3?

ryanmarsh 6y ago

This is pure (wild) speculation given my experience with data needs that seem to fit the product. I bet one (the) customer profile for this was military or intelligence (before it was available to the public). I say this given AWS prior gov/cia work. Securely capturing, transferring, and maintaining chain of custody for intel from various media and devices captured during raids or other activities was (several years ago) a total shit show. We had a closet full of trash bags from various raids. The analysts weren’t in the field, the op tempo and slow data rates prevented us from making good use of most of the data. Some of which was time sensitive (we would find out weeks later). Also some of the data captured was to be used as evidence in the host nation legal system (I don’t know if that ever happened) or (presumably) GITMO. I was just a grunt at the time, and this was a long time ago but I bet the problem still exists.

thenoblesunfish 6y ago

Didn't I see this on "Silicon Valley"?

eeZah7Ux 6y ago
This could fit into the SV show very well: "we invented on premise cloud" "you mean It's just a small server?" "no no it's like having a bit of cloud in your home"
DevMois 6y ago
Bezos signature edition coming soon

orthecreedence 6y ago

I see this and think "oh look, a surveillance company made another spy device they want me to buy and put in my home."

zelly 6y ago
It's a RasPi that glows in the dark

est31 6y ago

So you need to have Windows or Mac OS in order to use this? No love for Linux? https://aws.amazon.com/en/snowcone/resources/ https://aws.amazon.com/en/snowcone/resources/

duskwuff 6y ago
If you're on Linux, you're probably perfectly happy to use the `aws` command-line tools. No need for fancy graphics. :)
- est31 6y ago
  Didn't know they supported it as well. Thanks!

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

N_A_T_E 6y ago

All of this makes sense to me, except I have no idea how they fit 100tb of capacity in a box that small. Aren't HDDs maxing out around 16TB these days? They couldn't fit 6 drives in there.

luhn 6y ago
Not sure where you're seeing 100TB? > AWS Snowcone weighs 4.5 pounds and includes 8 terabytes of usable storage
- Dylan16807 6y ago
  Which makes it interesting in the other direction. If this box is worth two hundred dollars a month and two thousand dollars upon loss, why not put in a drive twice as big for an extra $200?
banana_giraffe 6y ago
You can fit 100tb in a Snowball, not the Snowcone, which maxes out at 8tb. Having dealt with a few Snowballs from time to time, there is zero doubt they have space in those things for 100tb. They're not small or lightweight devices. I'm super happy to see this device. It fills a niche a lot of my work falls into nicely.
teraflop 6y ago
If they really wanted to fit 100TB in a box that size, they could probably do it with flash. It would just be ludicrously expensive.
bithaze 6y ago
I was curious about this too, but going back now to take a closer look at that screenshot, those are three other Snowball models listed in the table, not three more Snowcone models.

pmorici 6y ago

Here is what I don't get about this product line. The docs say the encryption is done on the attached workstation. Which means your network transfer speed is going to be limited if you don't have a pretty high end machine with at least AESNI. What is the point of having the processor and all that in the device itself if you end up needing a high end workstation anyways to get the maximum performance out of the thing?

jon-wood 6y ago
It’s a trade off between speed and security, and my assumption is that they’ve chosen to do it this way so that the encryption key isn’t sitting on the device during transit. By doing it this way even if someone can intercept data while it’s being shipped between the customer and AWS all they’re going to get is a disk full of random bytes.
- pmorici 6y ago
  The device doesn't need to store the key to do the encryption. It can be given the key when you boot it and then clear it before shipment.

ryanisnan 6y ago

Hey Jeff, curious what the battery life of this device is? I'm on a team that has a need for remote compute power, but getting to our devices on anything more frequent than a monthly basis is sometimes a challenge.

ryanisnan 6y ago
Answered my own question! Thanks for posting! Has some cool applications for sure, but too much draw for set it and forget type of operations.
- rcar 6y ago
  On behalf of future searchers trying to avoid the "nvm I figured it out" problem, what was the answer?
qchris 6y ago
My team also may be looking for something with similar requirements in the near future, do you have any recommendations for solutions that you're considering? I know a number of earth science researchers that have mentioned ideas that would really benefit from that sort thing as well.
re 6y ago
It sounds like the device does not have an internal battery so it depends on the capacity of the battery that you attach to it. https://aws.amazon.com/snowcone/features/ https://aws.amazon.com/snowcone/features/ > For a light workload at 25% CPU usage, the device can run on a 65 W battery for approximately 6 hours. The docs are a little inconsistent on wattage requirement. The feature page above says "60 W+ (20 V) USB-C power adapters", but in the docs: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/snowball/latest/snowcone-guide/snowcone-spec-requirements.html#snowcone-power-supply https://docs.aws.amazon.com/snowball/latest/snowcone-guide/s... > any USB-C power adapter that is rated for 45W+

awsgeek 6y ago

My AWS Snow Family visual notes: https://www.awsgeek.com/AWS-Snow-Family/ https://www.awsgeek.com/AWS-Snow-Family/

roboyoshi 6y ago
neat. what do you use for drawing those diagrams?
- TkTech 6y ago
  Looks like Notability - https://github.com/AwsGeek/visualnotes https://github.com/AwsGeek/visualnotes

tdstein 6y ago

The 21st century's pneumatic tube!

rewsiffer 6y ago

Anyone know what the FCC ID is? I would love to see the FCC application teardown but can't find the FCC ID anywhere.

pmorici 6y ago
I doubt it has it's own FCC ID. It probably uses an off the shelf wifi card to avoid having to do FCC testing.

nevir 6y ago

I'm not sure whether I'm more annoyed by AWS' product naming scheme or the JS/Ruby/etc community's cutsy project names

divbzero 6y ago
I sometimes wonder if AWS product naming is driven by more than just cuteness or habit. Obscure names and acronyms could be an intentional strategy to tie users to AWS.

mmastrac 6y ago

What happened to the Google/AWS services where you could ship a raw HDD? It seems like they've both retired that service in favour of more expensive custom hardware.

robocat 6y ago
The HDD solution was problematic according to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23554752 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23554752

aapeli 6y ago

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.

JshWright 6y ago
Throw a red LED on top and it's literally "the internet" from The IT Crowd
eof 6y ago
I don't think that's a very realistic outlook. Most money spent in aws is not by noobs going over their free tier not realizing they could have bought a raspberry pi; it's by institutions that are paying for convenience and know it.
abri 6y ago
if they don't do it, someone else will
tinco 6y ago
One of the main reasons that we're running our own hardware is because it's difficult and cost prohibitive for us to get our data to a cloud provider. 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.

claytoneast 6y ago

The e-ink display part triggers thoughts of an Amazon of the future that uses entirely reusable boxes to ship things to consumers. Hard plastic containers w/ e-ink labels. Boom, no more millions (billions? trillions?) of cardboard/plastic boxes used to enclose packages. Still millions/billions/trillions of boxes/plastic packaging for the items themselves, but at least the transit envelope would be reusable.

fuball63 6y ago
That's a cool idea. I wonder how many re-uses a box like that would take to make it cost effective over the same amount of cardboard. Should be feasible I'd think.
- jayd16 6y ago
  If the cost to return the box is more than a cardboard box, its not feasible.
  - CobrastanJorji 6y ago
    Not necessarily. If the box costs 10 times as much, but they come up with a way to use the box 12 times, it was worth it. That won't work if the recipient doesn't have a need to mail something back, but for a use case where you expected most boxes would be shipped back (maybe a phone repair company?), it could absolutely make sense.
    - Dylan16807 6y ago
      The post you're saying "not necessarily" to has nothing to do with the cost of the box itself. If returning it costs too much, the box could be free and you'd lose money.
      - jcims 6y ago
        Just make it up in volume! ;)

zelly 6y ago

"raspberry pi but with NSA"

simias 6y ago

It's very tangential but what is the device shown next to the drive in the first picture? https://media.amazonwebservices.com/blog/2020/snowcone_jb_sticker_1.jpg https://media.amazonwebservices.com/blog/2020/snowcone_jb_st... I assumed it was here to give a sense of the relative size of the drive, but after staring at this picture for two minutes I genuinely have no idea what it is. Actually at first I even wondered if that was the drive, since it's vaguely more in the shape of a snowcone than the drive itself.

Elof 6y ago
I believe that's a water bottle
supakeen 6y ago
Thermos bottle for keeping drinks cold or warm.
aka1234 6y ago
It's a water bottle
ckosidows 6y ago
Water bottle or thermos?
Whiteshadow12 6y ago
I thought the same thing, to my embarrassment.

lai 6y ago

At first I thought it was the bottle.

phant0mas 6y ago

Something related from my previous job, for data storage there's Serverpack 35 from Acromove. 120 TB per box, suitcase form factor, includes tracking and remote control. You seal it and you load it in courier car. https://acromove.com/products/serverpack-35/ https://acromove.com/products/serverpack-35/ They also have Serverpack Edge which is supposed to do the same.

tibbon 6y ago

Wow, this could be awesome for running operation teams at Burning Man! (Seriously, at the moment, some teams literally offline their server and physically take it to the playa to run there instead of figuring out connectivity there. Very little of it's using newer tech)

deviation 6y ago

Seems relatively risk-adverse. Glad they're providing more variety to their data transferral services, but this really does seem like an extremely niche system that not many companies will fully utilise.

deviantflux 6y ago

Life imitates art https://youtu.be/iDbyYGrswtg https://youtu.be/iDbyYGrswtg

mwcampbell 6y ago

> The AMIs must be made from an instance launched from a CentOS or Ubuntu product in AWS Marketplace I wonder what's special about these images.

adamcharnock 6y ago

I'm in the process of starting an ISP right now, so I've just been getting prices for dedicated fibre lines. So let's do some quick math. A 1Gbps dedicated (uncontended) fibre line in Europe seems to be in the region of $/€/£600 per month. How much data can one push on that per day (assuming 1Gbit/s = 100Mb/s real world)? In one day: 100 * 60 * 60 * 24 = 8.64Tb So call it one snowcone per day. So you could in theory send 30 snowcones a month, a total snowcone value of $60*30 = $1800. However, at $60/snowcone, you would have to send 10 snowcones per month before your own dedicated line breaks even. So yeah, if you're sending 10 or more per month, every month, consider getting a dedicated line. But that seems like an unusual use case to me. There's also a bunch of organisational reasons to use something like snowcone, I'm sure.

aladine 6y ago

At the first glance, I thought Amazon ship Kindle to customer with storage as a bonus.

code4tee 6y ago

Just think of all the “snow” products as a modern version of sneaker net (it used to be faster to run down the hall with a disk than transfer files over the network because networks used to be really slow). The snow products solve the same issues. Despite fiber connections and such it just doesn’t make sense to transfer massive volumes of data over the network. It’s often literally faster and cheaper to ship a box of hard drives via UPS or FedEx. Snowball was for big sets of files and is the size of a suitcase. Snowmobile is for petabyte scale and is literally a tractor trailer full of disks. The use case here seems to be more towards remote situations with smaller data. You have something that collects a lot of data and need to get that into your cloud. Instead of running around with a bunch if portable hard drives and then having someone transfer the data manually to S3 over the internet you just dump your data into the snowcone and hand it to your local UPS guy and let AWS take care of the rest. Lots of remote data collection devices and such would fit into that model. Clearly the use case is rather specific but for people in the business of collecting data on stuff and then needing to get it into the cloud this is actually a nifty little device.

peterwwillis 6y ago

Oh, fun! When a good Chinese manufacturer duplicates the form factor, someone can ship clones of these laden with malware for spear-phishing attacks on corporate, industrial, and classified networks. > I connect the Snowcone to the power supply and to my network, and power up! After a few seconds of initialization, the device shows its IP address and invites me to connect: With a convincing e-Ink display, and an unusually long delay, you've probably got a good 10 minutes on this local network to 0-day your way into routers and client machines. > Next, I download AWS OpsHub for Snow Family, install it, and then configure it to access the device. I select Snowcone and click Next: By this point you make the device self-brick and print out an error about how it needs to be sent back to Amazon for repairs, due to being banged up during shipping. Extra scuffs or dents in the case will sell this. While the replacement is ordered, use your now client-resident malware to exfiltrate data as you like, since you know there's data worth them copying offline. Or trojan up every data format you see so that after the data is moved out via a working Snowball you can eventually find an internet-connected device to exfiltrate with.

a1a1a1a1a1a1 6y ago
This seems like a legitimate concern. I didn't see any indication that the snowcone presented a code that would be verified through the aws opshub application, or a similar operation. Is this happening behind the scenes, maybe in the manifest file you upload? If this was swapped in shipping it could potentially just work as expected while exfiltrating data whenever it could connect to the internet, potentially through builtin lte, etc.
lewis1028282 6y ago
Isn't that the same with any hardware you get? Someone could intercept your server from Dell and put malware on it.

totetsu 6y ago

Is there any open hardware equivalent to this? I can see it being very useful for crowdsourced archiving projects.

anonymousiam 6y ago

Capitalizing on the fact that sneakernet is still faster than Internet.

dmix 6y ago

It's funny hearing Amazon Polly trying to pronounce "vCPUs" like "vee-pus".

canthonytucci 6y ago

I tried to use Snowball as part of a customer facing solution, but the lack of predictability around turnaround times made it impossible for me to justify the expense and overhead. It is an awesome box and an awesome solution to a real life problem. I really wanted to love snowball. I was not filling them all the way up by any means, so the turnaround had to be fast enough for me to justify it over just uploading to s3 over slowish connections. The interface in the console was very opaque and gave no information about when the boxes would get shipped out. I had weeks long delays with zero contact when the box types I wanted were out of stock and only found out that was the cause when I cried to support. I also had boxes stall at the import stage after they had already been shipped back. The software to transfer was also just ok. I think with more love this can be a great tool, but there are some things that could make it better.