

Bypass the internet for large transfers: AWS Import/Export - mattjaynes
http://aws.amazon.com/importexport/

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nickb
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...

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dfranke
If it was only three months ago, more likely this service was already in
development and you were customer #1 without knowing it.

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3pt14159
Unlikely. I have 2 contacts that did the same thing months ago. I actually
thought that this was an already advertised service.

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mtkd
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.

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bravura
Agreed, except I have found it pretty tough to figure out EC2. EC2 is fairly
impenetrable at first.

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wheels
Obligatory Tanenbaum quote:

"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling
down the highway."

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jeffbarr
Indeed, so obligatory that I included it in my blog post:

<http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2009/05/send-us-that-data.html>

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jimbokun
Kudos (to all of you at Amazon) for being the first to turn that quote into a
product feature. Certainly seems obvious in retrospect.

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Skeuomorph
On the contrary, video delivery networks (VDNs) have been recommending loading
data this way for years, such as one that's routinely internationally FedEx-
ing those cheap 2TB "network" drives back and forth in small white mil-spec
shipping cases.

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kiwidrew
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. :)

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TJensen
The airlines have services for that (see Delta Dash) without needing to use
airline passengers. :)

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dfield
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.

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danw
Oh that's a shame, I didn't know it had been cut.

Amazon has a similar scheme "Public Datasets", that store data as an EBS
rather than an S3 bucket <http://aws.amazon.com/publicdatasets/>

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drawkbox
New cloud feature: Pony Express

Only kidding this is great for immense datasets.

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stevejalim
<lamejoke> Presumably a feature for Django devs</lamejoke>

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pierrefar
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.

~~~
cracki
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 about data, not executable code.

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loop
They only support SATA and USB-2, which unlike Firewire, do not work by DMA,
IIRC. I'd assume they do not support Firewire for exactly this reason: to
prevent a device from reading the systems memory directly (known as pwn-by-
iPod)

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tsuraan
SATA certainly does support DMA. DMA isn't a feature unique to firewire;
rather, USB is (nearly) unique in that it's the one high-speed standard that
doesn't support DMA.

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wmf
Also check out Terascale Sneakernet from Jim Gray et al. from 2002:
[http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=6457...](http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=64570)

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callmeed
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.

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siculars
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.

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katamole
Not really "AWS" then!

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alexkay
Dupe: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=620089>

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RiderOfGiraffes
Although this one is getting the comments.

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boundlessdreamz
Probably because of a better title giving people an idea about the service
even before they read the article.

