What is Digg?70 Comments
- Ghazi, on 10/12/2007, -1/+76Your link is no better. Direct link: http://aws.amazon.com/s3
- theHM, on 10/12/2007, -21/+80Please link to the actual story, not a blogging of it:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/03/14/amazon-grid-storage-web-service-launches/ - bradleybuda, on 10/12/2007, -4/+44Or a link to the actual amazon page
http://aws.amazon.com/s3 - fletchowns, on 10/12/2007, -7/+42Seriously. How many adsense infested lame blogs do we need to click through in order to get to the ACTUAL THING.
- whatsMYname, on 10/12/2007, -1/+12Maybe Digg needs to add another category to the problem list. In addition to the Spam, Bad Link, and Lame options there needs to be one called Unnecessary Blog Link
- Greg-J, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10There is definitely a benefit here. This is a great way to keep off site backups of databases and important information without paying a monthly storage fee. It's obviously not a viable solution for file serving though. For Instance:
A pretty general dedicated server deal would be something like 160GB hard drive with 2000GB of transfer for around $150 at a good, reliable host. That would cost you $24 in capacity at Amazon and a whopping $400 in bandwidth.
So yeah, it's a great solution for file storage - not so hot for file serving.
However, Amazon would charge you $400 - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -2/+12For $35 in storage and uploading that data to Amazon, I could just add another 300gb hard drive to my server at the colo in three months.
Doesn't seem like a huge cost-savings to me. - jesusphreak, on 10/12/2007, -2/+10No, you don't understand what the deal is here.
You can store unlimited files. You can have 500 GB of data on there. Its just the max file size is 5 GB. For just about anything you can think of...its plenty. You have a bunch of 5 gig mp3s? - honging, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8I'm going to reply in general to all the comments above that basically say ("Well, for that cost I can get ...")
First off, this is not a webhosting-type service; it is for developers. It could be used by consumers for backing up their own service, but given the API involved, it won't happen until somebody starts writing a toolkit for it (and Amazon's samples). Expect someone to release a site based on this storage mechanism soon that will offer backups for consumers.
As for the cost argument, everyone is missing the point. For the sake of argument, let's say I have 40GB worth of data I want to save. This will cost $14 to upload [20 x (0.15 0.20)] and $6 a month to maintain (and another $8 to pull down). Per year, (assuming one upload/download of all data), you're only paying $88/year. That is a small price to pay for peace of mind when it comes to not losing your data.
Yes, you could actually buy a real hard drive with that money, but then you don't get the redundancy (unless you happen to have a RAID card and an extra hard drive for redundancy). And you also don't get the network accessibility that is provided by Amazon which is useful if you want to move computers.
For consumers, this service by itself is not incredibly valuable yet, but once somebody builds a layer on top which makes backing up your system as simple as downloading a program and "syncing," expect a lot of less-technical folks to adopt it. Look at box.net; it's offering 5GB for $5/month ... if you ran a similar service, you could drive down the costs tremendously.
But in any case, I think this is geared much more towards development teams who need to drop in large files without worrying about it. It's a pain to maintain a rack (maintenance, hardware failures are common, etc.), especially if you have to hire somebody especially for that purpose. For those projects which quite aren't large enough to have the capital to get a rack but need a scalable backend, this is perfect.
The hard drive pricing seems right, although the bandwidth costs seem high. Amazon probably doesn't deal with the low-end providers like Cogent/Above.net. This makes it not quite as useful for filesharing (unless you use the Bittorent API, also provided by S3), but it still makes filehosting manageable (assuming you can control the # of accesses) - HappyScrappy, on 10/12/2007, -2/+8Unlimited storage. At a price. By that measure, Fry's Electronics already offers me unlimited storage.
- jron, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7you are almost correct, there is NO savings here at all. server matrix blows these prices away.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6How would it be a great deal for offsite backups?
Let's say you wanted to back up 200gb worth of stuff at 15 cents per gb per month. That's $360/yr. To back that data up will cost you $40 at 20 cents per gb. That's a total of $400 for just one year.
For $100 *LESS* you could just buy three 300GB hard drives and setup a redundant RAID-5 for storage/backup. That's 600GB of storage.
That makes it 33% cheaper for 300% the storage. And that's only after the first year. While you keep paying with the Amazon system, you only have to pay with your own array when a drive bites the dust.
I'm sure there is some use for this Amazon system, but I don't see how backups/storage is one of them.
By the way, for less than $100/mo you could also get a dedicated 1U rack at a colo, stick your server in it and have a 1mbit pipe. You could fit more storage in it, have no latency in retrieving that data and have the full server to go with it. - leoCT, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5It could actually be pretty good for small backups. I'm talking about your essential documents, not media files. Your working documents. Let's say 2 GB. The first backup would cost $.40 and incremental backups would be really cheap. Then 30 cents a month to maintain your data. Much better than buying a HD and plus you have an off site backup, which is always better than a local (even external) HD. Of course, assuming they can guarantee the integrity of you data to certain degree. I guess there should be some redundancy in the storage.
- DoubtfulSalmon, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5> I would say their warranies are pretty weak for the safe storage:
I reckon that for a company operating in American jurisdiction with American customers, they're pretty much right on the money with their #include disclaimer.h.
Society has 'advanced' to the point where people really aren't very good at taking responsibility for their own actions any more. If they make bad decisions, and run their own business in to the ground, then the first thing they do is start looking around for someone else to blame.
If some moron convinces himself that he's dreamed up the next big dot.com, and it dot.bombs, he's going to cast his mind back to that four minutes of downtime that his amazon.com host had in the summer of '69^H^H06, decide that that's the root cause of all his business problems, and he'll sue before you can say "Lawyers at twenty paces".
I don't think I'll get too much argument if I claim that America is the most litigious country in the world. Amazon operates in a litigious environment, and they'd be "pretty weak" if they *didn't* protect themselves from the nutters that will sue at the drop of a hat. - digboy99, on 10/12/2007, -6/+10For those who complain about the blog links, try mapping the googlesyndication.com domain in your hosts file to your localhost. Pages that contain adwords will no longer load, and so the bloggers who try to make a buck off of the digg clicks will get nothing.
- tuxidomasx, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I agree, this could certainly be good for something like a flickr competitor who needs reliable space fast without paying too much in advance. BUT after looking at the terms of service, i found this:
"2) You may make calls at any time that the Amazon Web Services are available, provided that you either: (i) do not exceed 1 call per second per IP address, or send files greater than 40K; or (ii) do not exceed the limits set forth in the Service Terms for a particular Service. If you build and release an Application, the stated limitations apply to each installed copy of the Application."
1 call per second per IP address. Clearly this is NOT an option for a high traffic site. The service may be good for developers for backups, but it doesnt lend itself to file serving. How many times do you think the flickr harddrives get hit per second? If your server is responsible for grabbing the data from amazon, you will be bottlenecked by this requirement.
the alternative is to allow the users to connect to the web service. but even this is bad since you will have to give them the access credentials. and what about users behind a NAT router. to amazon they will all have the same ip.
i dont see this service as anything more than a robust backup solution. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3"I don't have any 5GB mp3's but I'm willing to bet a lot of databases are more than 5GB, and HD content is going to be well over 5GB in filesize."
Well, they refer to things as "objects". So that leads me to suspect they just store your files in a database on their end as an object. I'm not sure what (if any) databases can handle a 5gb object (postgresql has a 1 gb object limit).
I was thinking about music. But even just as a way to store and stream music, it is expensive. For $40/yr, I can use mp3tunes.com and store as many songs taking up as much space as I want without ANY limit and stream it to any machine in the world that I want to listen to it at for as long as I want. For $40, I couldn't even afford to upload my collection to an amazon storage system.
It will be interesting to see what kind of services people use this for. Who knows? - GORby, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3AND... you didn't read the article properly.
The service allows you to save an unlimited (unless by your cash reserve) amount of files, with each file limited in size to 5GB. For larger files, you'll just have to split them...
At least, that's what the article really says... - ajz8182, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5Same discussion over at /.
http://slashdot.org/articles/06/03/15/0424216.shtml - davdav, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3One file is 5gb
rtfa - lbft, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3It's a limit of 5GB per file, not overall. You can store as much as you can pay for as long as they're all individually under 5GB.
- cdunn, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2thats a bunch of *****.
name one host that gives you 160gb of storage and *****2000GB****** of bandwidth for $150
...unless you are talking about some hole in the wall run on a t1 by some teenagers
RELIABLE dedicated hosting costs you no where below $100 for like 50gb of transfer - Strd, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3 I would say their warranies are pretty weak for the safe storage:
9. DISCLAIMER OF WARRANTIES AND LIMITATION OF LIABILITY
...
AMAZON DOES NOT WARRANT THAT AMAZON WEB SERVICES ARE FREE OF VIRUSES OR OTHER HARMFUL COMPONENTS,
OR THAT THEY WILL BE ACCESSIBLE ON A PERMANENT BASIS
OR WITHOUT INTERRUPTION
OR THAT THE DATA YOU STORE IN ANY SERVICE ACCOUNT WILL NOT BE LOST OR DAMAGED.
.... - nihilator, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Sounds like putting all of our eggs in one public basket. What happens if it gets compromised in some way? Or they hand it over to the government some day? Or the the RIAA/MPAA gets access to it? I know it's a lot of "what if" concerns, but just some things I would be concerned about.
- Evic, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Exactly - the power of this services comes to the developer community. I am sure there are literally hundreds of people out there with startup ideas that need a massive amount of storage. As I stated in my blog (which is why I linked to it rather than the Amazon page), a flickr, MySpace, etc. competitor could easily use the S3 service to keep their bottom-line costs down.
Of course, any good development team will eventually purchase their own equipment, once they get VC funding and such, but the beauty of this is that you can realize your application without paying thousands of dollars in hardware right off the bat. You can easily get a mockup done and see if your idea is worthwhile, and if it's not - hell, you're out a few dollars. - honging, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2From their site:
Reliable: Store data durably, with 99.99% availability. There can be no single points of failure. All failures must be tolerated or repaired by the system without any downtime.
Amazon uses this site internally, which means they're not releasing some half-assed service that's going to buckle and crash. It's going to be of the highest quality (Amazon has a better track record than other companies on providing stable webservices).
"And if you're a developer doing anything of interest, chances are you already have your own servers hosted somewhere (not hosted on someone else's server, etc)."
Not true. I have my own servers which are used for the www frontend (displaying the files, cause the S3 bandwidth pricing is a bit high for my tastes) for a smallish site, but I'd rather use Amazon's service as an infinitely scalable backup solution that I don't have to concern myself with administering. I'd rather be coding for the site than wondering if my backup server is still up, whether I need to install new hard drives in, and whatnot. - valan, on 10/12/2007, -3/+5those are horrible prices
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Yeah, but if you read the Amazon site, they don't seem to be presenting it as a "backup solution for home users" or anything. They seem to be presenting it as something for service and web providers of various sorts...
- honging, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2leoCT's got it. You don't backup your pointless junk (do you really want to spend money backing up large media files that you can get again from the web?), but only your critical items, and this is a great solution.
Someone *will* write some sort of layer on top so most people don't have to delve into the coding. Once they do... then this offering will be much more attractive, especially since you can also use it to sync multiple computers with documents. - jesusphreak, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3Thank you for the explanation. That really does help a lot.
- Evic, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3All: I posted the link to the blog in hopes you would read my comments and a further explanation as to what this service is for before commenting. This is not for personal backup - it's to expensive compared to other services.
S3 is for the developer that doesn't have thousands of dollars in VC funding to develop their killer idea application, without having to drop all that money on hardware right off the bat. If the idea doesn't turn out to be that great, you're out a few dollars rather than being the proud new owner of a box with more power than you know what to do with and will be outdated in 6 months. - OperatorNo9, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3TheRealPod,
LMAO. Fox news excluded. Yeah, good old agenda free Fox News.
Blogging is fantastic for giving people a voice who otherwise wouldn't have one. Think of the soldiers in Iraq. What war before this one could you get the soldiers perspective of what's going on in the war on a daily basis in the soldiers own words. Or that homeless guys blog about the daily struggles of life on the street. In this way, blogs are an invaluable source of insight and perspective.
But the problem with blogging is that everyone has a voice now. Regardless of how (un)interesting, (ir)relevant or even (un)entertaining their story is, they all get to sign up for a Google Ads account and start tricking, luring and coaxing people to come to their blog only to find that they have blogged another blog entry about blogging.
As far as the story is concerned, it is a great idea but I don't anticipate that they will be able to charge for it for very long with Google on their heels with a free service. It is for a different target market (i.e. developers) but nothing is going to stop developers from using Google's free service. It doesn't matter if it's 1 penny per gig. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2That is far too expensive to be useful. If charging for bandwidth at least drop the monthly storage charge...
- honging, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Continue reading the TOS:(http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html/ref=sc_fe_c_0_16427261_5/103-2158293-2851027?%5Fencoding=UTF8&node=3440661&no=16427261)
B. Amazon S3 - Simple Storage Service
*snip*
2) The limitation of 1 call/per second/per IP address set forth in Section 1.A.2 above is not applicable to your use of Amazon S3. You may not, however, store "objects" (as described in the user documentation) that contain more than 5 Gigabytes of data, or own more than 100 "buckets" (as described in the user documentation) at any one time.
*snip*
-------------
Basically, no limitations. Those only apply to other AWS. - davdav, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Blocked
- Milamber, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3Or people could use adblock plus and the filter updater for Firefox. I very rarely see any adverts online these days. Not sure what IE users can do other than tweak the hosts file as method mentioned above. But to be honest, I think IE users should be worried about more than adverts making their way in to their browsers.
- amoeba, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Lucky this quote isn't taken out of context :
"The system considers the failure of components to be a normal mode of operation.."
( http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html/102-7042892-2853716?node=16427261 ) - jakeg, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Except that your $90 hard drive is a lot more likey to die than amazon's servers...
- leoCT, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Yeah, but do you want to write code to utilize their API to backup your data? Then you're talking about 40 cents worth of data and who knows how long writing your application? :)
I would sure pay $10 for a decent piece of software that did that. Better yet, I would donate $15 for a free source option. But it is hardly the case there is a market for that, so maybe someone with a free weekend... - Evic, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Of course they have those notices, here are what they are covering:
A) They don't virus scan the stuff you upload, if you upload a virus - hey, you're going to have a virus there.
B) Lightning strikes Amazon's datacenter, the building burns down, all while your internet connection goes out at your home in Alaska - well, you're not going to have permanent access to your data, your service will be interuppted, and the data you just stored is probably lost and/or damaged. - honging, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0A valid concern, but it's not something specifically targetted to Amazon. If you're colocating, that doesn't magically free you from government pressures. If the government is going after your data, regardless of where you are, they will get you.
So just don't abuse the server and use it for anything illegal, and you're fine. If you're still paranoid about security, then encrypt your files before backup. - Evic, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1You are assuming you are going to use all 2000GB in bandwidth as well. Regular hosts charge you for a limit of bandwidth, so you are often paying for pipe you aren't using. Amazon will only be charging for bandwidth you actually use.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Yeah, but do you want to write code to utilize their API to backup your data? Then you're talking about 40 cents worth of data and who knows how long writing your application? :)
I wonder if they will allow you to write your own applications and sell them - so if someone wanted to write a gmail/xdrive style application for use with Amazon...
I read through most of their terms of service agreement, but... - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2"Can you use this as a replacement for a MySQL database? Or is this only for pictures/music/etc?"
I suppose you could, but then you'd have to write your own software to do all the searching and storing and everything else. They just give you an API to store and retrieve and delete the files. Everything else is on your side.
I'd rather put the money into actual hardware. You're going to have to back the data up *anyway* on your own end since you certainly can't just assume that nothing will ever go bad at Amazon. - Evic, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1You're missing the point. Google won't be offering POST and REST interfaces, therefore web application developers (who S3 is targetting, as the article states) can't use it.
Well, they could for personal storage - which is what GDrive is targetting. Amazon's S3 is not for those people, S3 is for the flickr competitor that doesn't have the money to buy their own hardware come day 1, but need to get some funding before they transition into their own hardware - for example.
Almost getting tired of typing this over and over - if people would just read a little bit and educate themselves before speaking we would live in a much less ignorant world. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1What am I missing here? Can't you essentially use email the same way? Attach file, hit send, boom--instant backup. For small scale backups that seems to me to be free, worldwide accessible, and reasonably secure.
- spadin, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1It's actually not that bad of a deal. This would be a great for something like a flickr-like startup. A linux distro might be good to put here too. You can put the file and the BT tracker on there and relieve some of the bandwidth cost as well.
- atrerra, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I think you can serve files publicly (without a user logging into amazon) as long as your permissions on the 'object' permit this, and you have to generate the url (which contains a key). I'm not entirely sure on this though.. anyone?
- jesusphreak, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2Can you use this as a replacement for a MySQL database? Or is this only for pictures/music/etc?
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