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