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Category: Technology Author : Steven Hodson Posted: May 21, 2009
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Amazon’s new Pony Express service


ponyexpresscomm

Okay so it’s not quite a pony express service in the truest sense of the word but in a day and age when cloud computing and fast broadband are the hot buzzwords Amazon’s new AWS Import/Export service sure sounds like a modern day equivalent to it. The idea that it would be faster to send a hard drive full of data to Amazon in order for it to be uploaded to the company’s S3 account with Amazon strikes me as borderline ludicrous.

The fact that we are being driven to using the postal, or courier, service for transferring data raises two points. The first it shows how inadequate our broadband really is and the second is that if we are producing such large amounts of data is the idea of cloud computing even practical on a large scale?

To give you an idea of what Amazon’s recommendations for considering the Pony Express USPS option Stacey Higginbotham provided a nice cheat sheet with her post on GigaOM about this great move forward in data transfer.

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Kind of reminds me of the old sneaker net days only with hooves.










Comments


One Archived Response to “ Amazon’s new Pony Express service ”

  1. Kyle Brady
    May 21, 2009

    This really isn't that ludicrous. If you've ever unzipped a base install of WordPress, and uploaded the files uncompressed to the server… you've seen that typically takes a few minutes.

    And that's just WordPress.

    Now try uploading a DVD's worth of family holiday pictures – if the connection doesn't timeout, it will take hours. Maybe you try compressing the files into 6 or so segments, but it will still take hours… just a few less than before.

    Let's expand that out to corporate scale. As much as I hate Twitter, imagine the data it stores on a single user: all the profile information, login information, access information (login dates, IPs, etc.), not to mention the endless stream of Socrates-like insights posted to the web.

    If a user downloaded all of their data after using Twitter the way most people seem to for a few months, and wanted to upload to AWS to implement their own service… you'd get your own personal Failwhale.

    I personally wouldn't mind shipping an HDD to Amazon for processing, especially if you're a small company. Using 80% of the network's bandwidth for two days is going to pull almost all other activity to a screeching halt, which is going to result in time/work/money lost for the company.

    Maybe the assorted internet commentators should do a little more data-processing before publicly stating opinions… even GigaOm approached this condescendingly, when Amazon should be praised for trying to help their customers achieve the highest possible rate of efficiency.

    Even if that means circumventing the black-market highseas robbery that are American ISPs.

    –Kyle