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Comment by dzdt | Hacker News Reader

As always the problem seems to be the 'Hotel California' issue: you can check out but you can never leave. Once you have massive data in AWS there is no efficient and affordable solution to move that data back out; you are locked in forever subject to whatever future terms Amazon may chose to impose.

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It is for backups of which you have another copy. To switch providers you would start shipping new backups to the new provider. Once your confident the provider has all the backups to meet your retention policy, you abandon AWS.

AWS will do anything to get your data into their cloud. I realized this a few years ago when Snowmobile was released: https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile

“Transfer up to 100 PB per Snowmobile, a 45-foot-long ruggedized shipping container pulled by a semi-trailer truck.” - I’m guessing usually used to migrate corporate information into AWS, but can also be used for data export. They advertise Exabytes (using more than one rig I guess). https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/

https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/faqs/

> Snowmobile does not support data export.

Hmmmm - the subheading of the page says “Migrate or transport exabyte-scale datasets into and out of AWS”, and in the diagram they repeat it. Either AWS is being deceptive, or the FAQ is wrong. Someone who cares that has a corporate AWS account should check or get documentation corrected? More interesting to know how AWS respond…

  Q: Can I export data from AWS with Snowmobile? Snowmobile does not support data export. It is designed to let you quickly, easily, and more securely migrate exabytes of data to AWS. When you need to export data from AWS, you can use AWS Snowball Edge to quickly export up to 100TB per appliance and run multiple export jobs in parallel as necessary.

Interesting since there is obviously no technical reason the export can’t be done from AWS. ⸘Technically you could export exabytes using tens of thousands of 100TB Snowball Edge devices‽

The snowball “device” is pretty neat:

* 45-foot long High Cube shipping container

* [each snowmobile container] comes with a removable connector rack with up to two kilometers of networking cable that can directly connect to the network backbone in your data center.

* AWS can provide the auxiliary chiller if needed based on the site survey findings [if temperature exceeds 85F/29.4C]

* A fully powered Snowmobile requires ~350KW [sic] Generators can be provided by AWS if needed

* Snowmobile pricing is based on the amount of data stored on the truck per month. Provisioned Snowmobile Capacity: $0.005/GB per month

I wonder if they haven't updated that in a while, it sounds low. You can get 22TB 3.5" hard drives these days. If I take that storage and figure full racks with rackmount NASes I get 30 feet long for 1 row of full-size racks. 45 feet is longer and they probably have room for at least 2 rows. Even accounting for probably needing some controller computers and routers and network interfaces and such, I would think they could at least double that these days.

Surely for hardware being lugged around on the back of a truck, potentially exposed to whatever heat, humidity, vibration, etc - redundancy becomes a vital component of the design. I would expect at least 2-3x replication for every byte written. Depending on how sealed the container is, they may not want to physically extricate failed drives and merely mark them as unavailable for use.

> Once you have massive data in AWS there is no efficient and affordable solution to move that data back out; you are locked in forever subject to whatever future terms Amazon may chose to impose.

You can have your shit packed into a snowball and shipped to you.

But you pay the same egress rate.

There's no egress for snowball, you just pay snowball pricing.

Can you?

https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/faqs/ > Snowmobile does not support data export.

It's confusing.

https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/

Quickly retrieve data from the cloud whenever you need it.

What does it mean?

Perhaps "once we have imported your data, you can quickly retrieve data from the cloud using the regular S3 APIs and fee structure". Or in other words, "there is no special restriction on data added through Snowball".

Feels a bit like intentional misdirection, but it's more likely a case of sloppy writing.

Snowball and Snowmobile are different. Snowball does support it.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/snowball/latest/developer-guide/...

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