About 3 months ago, I needed >50Gb of data uploaded to AWS and I asked a friend of mine who works at Amazon for help. He asked around and told me to mail the external storage to Amazon with keys/bucket info and a special code. I UPSed the stuff and within 2 days of arrival, I received an email with a notification that the transfer was done. Later on, I got the storage back. Everything worked as advertised!
I guess there's so much demand for this sneakernet that they made an official service. I wonder how many other people asked for transfer help before today's announcement...
When I read the announcement this morning, it occurred to me that the reason I like AWS so much, and what separates them from other cloud offerings, is that they're doing stuff dev teams actually want and can use (not impenetrably complex tech we could use with some vendor consultancy). Import features like this are trivial for AWS to implement - but will be a step change for some customers.
Last generation vendors saying 'anyone can do what AWS are doing' is just crap. You can't buy the enthusiasm these guys have - and its not just one individual - if you talk to anyone from AWS (and they're often around nights/weekends to talk about stuff) they are in a different lane to the competition or vendors that should be the competition.
Living in a country that's stuck on the end of an expensive and slow(ish) undersea cable for the past few years, sometimes my thoughts wander towards something like this. Even just a service (US-based) that would download a set of files (HTTP, FTP, bittorrent), burn them to DVD, and post them via airmail would be pretty handy. Bonus points if there was a way to use airline passengers as your couriers, such that the total latency might only be ~24 hours. :)
Google had a neat feature related to this in implementation but not goal since 2007ish. It was called Google Datasets and let you mail in a hard drive. Google would then host the data on the web. It's audience was purely academic, though... no money exchange involved.
Anyway, it got cut back last Fall. Cool to see it's still living on in some form.
How do they do virus and security checking? I don't know how they import the data, but it could be that they use a system that can be exploited using a security vulnerability?
It's a (very) long shot for this kind of thing to work, but still it's a risk worth asking about. They are at the end of they day hooking up hardware to their computer - i.e. physical access to the machine.
would you risk your account by intentionally adding malware to your data sets?
HDDs are passive, there is no danger in merely hooking one up. and as long as the file system drivers are solid, shoveling these bits into "buckets" (whatever these are) is safe too. you're just shoveling the bits, not looking at them.
This is going to be great for professional photographers (the industry I work in). I'm been advocating they use S3 for archiving for some time ... now it's easier to get your files there.
hmm... maybe i'll sneakernet all my music/photos now. been waiting for a sneakernet uploading service. it was only a matter of time before they added one.
wonder how long before smugmug adds a wraper around this and lets you send your dvd/smartcard/etc media and get it directly uploaded into your account.
[+] [-] nickb|17 years ago|reply
I guess there's so much demand for this sneakernet that they made an official service. I wonder how many other people asked for transfer help before today's announcement...
[+] [-] dfranke|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mtkd|17 years ago|reply
Last generation vendors saying 'anyone can do what AWS are doing' is just crap. You can't buy the enthusiasm these guys have - and its not just one individual - if you talk to anyone from AWS (and they're often around nights/weekends to talk about stuff) they are in a different lane to the competition or vendors that should be the competition.
[+] [-] bravura|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wheels|17 years ago|reply
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."
[+] [-] jeffbarr|17 years ago|reply
http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2009/05/send-us-that-data.html
[+] [-] jjs|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tophat02|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kiwidrew|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TJensen|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dfield|17 years ago|reply
Anyway, it got cut back last Fall. Cool to see it's still living on in some form.
[+] [-] danw|17 years ago|reply
Amazon has a similar scheme "Public Datasets", that store data as an EBS rather than an S3 bucket http://aws.amazon.com/publicdatasets/
[+] [-] drawkbox|17 years ago|reply
Only kidding this is great for immense datasets.
[+] [-] stevejalim|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pierrefar|17 years ago|reply
It's a (very) long shot for this kind of thing to work, but still it's a risk worth asking about. They are at the end of they day hooking up hardware to their computer - i.e. physical access to the machine.
[+] [-] cracki|17 years ago|reply
HDDs are passive, there is no danger in merely hooking one up. and as long as the file system drivers are solid, shoveling these bits into "buckets" (whatever these are) is safe too. you're just shoveling the bits, not looking at them.
this is about data, not executable code.
[+] [-] wmf|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] callmeed|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] siculars|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] katamole|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alexkay|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RiderOfGiraffes|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alexkay|17 years ago|reply