Disclaimer: I work at AWS, totally different team, and had never heard of this product until this announcement. This is 100% my personal opinion and I'm not operating in any official capacity.

>Personally, I'd probably just suffer through having to spend a week doing a slow internet upload/download rather than paying for Snowcone.

Well, I think there's two things here.

1) A lot of businesses probably won't be willing to spend a week with reduced internet capacity to upload stuff. Things we as single users might be okay with might not always translate to being a good fit for a business overall.

2) My reading is that some of the use cases for this are areas where you are likely to have limited or no internet connectivity.

From https://aws.amazon.com/snowcone/

>AWS Snowcone is built for edge computing and data storage outside of a data center. It is designed to meet stringent standards for ruggedization, including free-fall shock, operational vibration, and more. When sealed, the device is both dust-tight and water-resistant, protected from water jets on all sides. Snowcone has a wide operating temperature range from freezing to desert-like conditions, and withstands even harsher temperatures in storage.

and:

>AWS Snowcone deploys virtually anywhere you need it. It features 2 CPUs, 4 GB of memory, 8 TB of usable storage, Wi-Fi or wired access, and USB-C power using a cord or optional battery. You can put it in a messenger bag, run it in an autonomous vehicle or an airplane, or even attach it to a drone.

So, ruggedization and the ability to run this totally off battery points me towards thinking about use cases where there's not existing infrastructure to take advantage of. I guess this supported by the 'run it in an autonomous vehicle or airplane' bit I'm quoting as well.

>1) A lot of businesses probably won't be willing to spend a week with reduced internet capacity to upload stuff. Things we as single users might be okay with might not always translate to being a good fit for a business overall.

Perfect for us. We used to ship small amount of data in the scheme of things on external drives to Amazon for long term storage in Glacier. Worked great. That program was dropped and replaced by Snowball.

We tried Snowball and never could get it to work properly in our location. Amazon support couldn't get it to work, either. It was really overblown for what we wanted to, anyway.

Sending over the wire isn't an option for us.

This is a better solution for us as long as the networking issues are resolved and the pricing works out.

> 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?

Most or at least many households in the UK I think max out at my speeds (FTTC) which puts me at about 20Mbps upload. At 2.5 meg/second that's over 4 days per TB if I've done my maths right. 8TB is over a month.

I'm looking at a house where I'd have an upload speed about 1-2Mbps, so well over a month per TB uploaded.

> It would be cool to have a swarm of Raspberry Pi sized devices that I controlled entirely through the AWS console with AWS services,

You used to be able to manage things on opsworks outside of AWS if you installed a client. Maybe you still can do this kind of thing - possibly AWS Systems Manager for non-opsworks things? I get a bit lost in all the services these days and their restrictions.

Disclaimer: AWS employee, don't work on any of the Snow products

My guess is for situations where you don't have a decent internet connection. Like some remote research base way out in the middle of nowhere. The other major application I can think of is for transferring data to air-gapped networks. You could use Snowball for this also, but that would be overkill in a lot of cases. I think for air-gapped networks this is meant to fill in the niche between a USB drive and something like Snowball.

EDIT: expanding on that off the top of my head I can think of a couple other applications. If you're using long range drones with lots of sensors (think RQ-4 global hawk, but also weather monitoring and the like) you're generating way more data than you could stream over a satellite uplink. So you could put a snowcone (or maybe several) inside the drone and use them for storage of all that raw data. On landing you can remove the snowcone(s) and ship it off to Amazon and all that raw data is available on S3 the next day. There's a bunch of other defense-type applications. Embassies could transfer these in diplomatic pouches for top secret information. In fact, if you wanted to be particularly secure but wanted lower latency, you could use the snowball to transfer a bunch of random bytes to use as a one time pad, which the embassy or intelligence center could use on demand as it transfers data back.

I would guess the real use case is: you considered becoming a Snowmobile customer but that's too heavy-duty and you need something for smaller amounts of data. Or you are a Snowmobile customer but sometimes you don't need to back up the truck for a relatively modest-in-size update.

So AWS made this.

Now they have an offering for you & everyone like you, that they can pitch to CxO execs, especially those who came from Snowmobile-using companies.

AWS already had Snowball available as an intermediate level:

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

For upload it doesn't make much sense. For download it's less than half the cost compared to AWS outbound bandwidth to the internet.

Holy hell. I'm looking at the pricing example on this page [0], and at $460 to transfer out 15 TB, you're telling me this is less than half the price of normal internet outbound traffic?

I knew AWS bandwidth costs were absurd, but it wasn't until seeing those numbers that it really hit me just how absurd they are.

0: https://aws.amazon.com/snowcone/pricing/

Yeah, come for the cheap compute, stay for the expensive network costs... forever.

A residential cable connection realistically offers something like 25Mbps down/3Mbps up. That's 246 days to upload 8TB!

According to Speedtest.net [0], the average US internet speed is 138Mbps down/51Mbps up. That's certainly not amazing, but on average that's only ~2 weeks to upload 8 TB.

I can certainly see where this makes more sense if you're below that average, though.

0: https://www.speedtest.net/global-index/united-states#fixed

I would add the standard caution when looking at averages, that symmetric 1/1 fiber may be pulling the upload value up significantly. Or that Speedtest users have higher internet speeds.

But I really want that stat to be true. The world of American ISPs is sad and depressing.

Average is useless here, because upload is so very restricted on some connections, but not others.

The first google result for median says it was 60/5 two and a half years ago. If you can sustain 90% saturation that's 164 days. Over half a year at 80%.

Also, what type of customers run speed test normally? Those on the more technical side, thus those running the test are likely to have higher level packages from their providers, further skewing the data

Wow! That's very surprising. It's been a while since I lived without fibre; maybe DOCSIS got a lot smarter in the last few years?

It hasn't in the US. Comcast's 1G down is still 10Mbit up

Mine is 35. Still terrible.

> 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.

You’re looking for Greengrass, which is hidden away in the IoT tooling AWS provide. It allows you to run Lambda functions and Docker containers on Raspberry Pi (and smaller) sized devices, controlled entirely through the AWS console.

Snowcone supports Greengrass, in fact

My employer has locations all over the world and provide services to our customers. Some of these are AWS customers as well and depends on a small edge compute that they control and knows is compliant with this and that.

For them Snowcone is perfect as it's much cheaper than Snowball and does the job of trickling data back home.

> Hardware failures on amazon.

“Someone else’s problem”

That’s what you’re paying for on any cloud provider. Any hardware problem isn’t your problem and it (should be) abstracted away.

That's true for hardware that's actually "in the cloud" (aka at an AWS data center) where a hardware failure simply results in your workload automatically shifting to other hardware. But if a Snowcone breaks on you, it still certainly is your problem, because you're the one that now has a physical brick in your office and you need to find a replacement hardware for whatever you were previously using Snowcone for.

My bad. I didn’t actually read the article!