Amazon Introduces AWS Snowcone: 8TB Of Storage For Edge Computing Within 9 x 6 x 3 Inches

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Amazon Introduces AWS Snowcone: 8TB Of Storage For Edge Computing Within 9 x 6 x 3 Inches

Amazon's AWS has today introduced the smallest member of the "Snow" family for migrating data into/out-of the cloud...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Amazon-AWS-Snowcone

[CommunityMember]

Clearly the next offering in the snow family needs to be the snowflake (a bunch of encrypted microSD cards) used to validate https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/

[deusexmachina]

Can tell these people are sick by how they speak: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9euPWOLtzuw

https://www.urbandictionary.com/defi...The%20Snowcone

[AndyChow]

Can tell these people are sick by how they speak: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9euPWOLtzuw

https://www.urbandictionary.com/defi...The%20Snowcone

The "you had me at edge computing" part was so cringe. So it's a rugged hard-drive.

As for the true difference between a snowcone and a snowball is:

[S.Pam]

What price?

[starshipeleven]

So it's a rugged hard-drive.

Yeah, with two cores and 4GB of RAM. You didn't read the blog post for shit, did you?

It is a miniserver-NAS connected to your cloud account, using the drive as a local cache to access or transfer data to the cloud storage, that Amazon controls and maintains remotely.

It is able to run a few low-end instances of their container system for applications, and it is managed with the same web based infrastructure as a (much bigger) cloud computing virtual server thing in the "snow" family https://aws.amazon.com/snow/

And the main reason these things exist is that in most cases the on-premises equipment is a raging dumpster fire as far as security goes, while these devices are managed by Amazon so they are likely much better than average.

These bricks provide simpler interfaces like NFS shares and able to run some basic application instances (probably to communicate with on-site equipment and extract data to load on the cloud), removing the need to run a server with some application that is talking to the cloud servers with an API (and can do much more damage if it's buggy or compromised).

[enihcam]

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/databox/data-box-overview

Microsoft has this technology since last year.

[CommunityMember]

It is able to run a few low-end instances of their container system for applications

And for those with larger scale requirements, there is the AWS Outpost (essentially a rack filled with AWS servers and storage that is managed by AWS and is used by the customer as just another AWS resource). The Outpost would normally be for those who have embraced AWS, but need lower latency closer to their customers/users where Local Zones (an AWS mini DC using the Outpost design) are not currently in plan or would still be inadequate.

[elatllat]

starshipeleven, AWS has good security granularity, so I think these devices are more to act as a standardized encrypted package for people with slow internets and inability to use dm-clone.

[AmericanLocomotive]

So the current tend is now to get the data closer to the end-user? How much longer until we end up full-circle with all of our apps, data and everything being local on our devices again?

I remember back in the mid 2000s, there were experimental web-based "Operating Systems". The idea was that you would do all of your computing completely through a web browser on the "cloud". Chromebooks sort of took that concept, but they are basically slowing shifting towards becoming full-blown computers. They added a taskbar, you can use your Google Docs/Sheets/Presentations in "offline mode", you can save files locally, you can run native chromebook applications, run android applications, and now even Linux applications.