[SATLUG] Amazon Web Services (AWS) Simple Storage Service (S3)...

[John Pappas]

On Sat, 2006-11-04 at 20:49 -0600, K. Spoon wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 04, 2006 at 05:09:18PM -0600, John Pappas wrote:
> > Hey All,
> > 
> > I have been playing with AWS S3 lately.  Has anyone else?  What other
> > online storage services are you all using, if any? 
> > 
> > For those of you who may not know of this service, it is a pay to use
> > online storage service.  Current rates are $0.17/GB/Month and $0.20/GB
> > transferred.
> > 
> > I love it.
> 
> Wow.  Awesome fscking find, John.
> 
> I've been exploring all of the stuff in labs.google.com for the past
> couple of months... looks like it's time to check out what Amazon's got
> hiding in plain sight.  :)  With any luck, there'll be a solution to my
> e-commerce conundrum..

Now I will have to check labs.google.com!

> ObTopic: The method I've been using has been simply using cheap
> dedicated servers that package decent sized disks and lots of bandwidth.
> For about $95/month you can get a celeron server with a 120GB drive and
> at least 1TB of transfer which works out to about $0.79/month with the 
> option to move the data 10 times before you hit the limit.  If you're willing
> to take the capex hit up front, I've found colo for a 1U server with a fixed
> 1Mb transfer rate is about $70-$90/month. 
> 
> Downsides:
> * more root passwords to manage (ugh), more syslogs to watch, and more machines
>   to update when a vuln is found  
> * cost is all up-front instead of pay-as-you-go

Add one downside: it is still (most likely) a single spindle.  AFAIK S3
uses "google-esque" storage - IE lots of commodity hardware EXPECTED to
fail regularly, so it it stored redundantly to counter fragile node
failure.

> Upsides:
> * you can use whatever transfer method you want  :)
> * you control who can see the data
> 
> Also, on the matter of dealing with DAV, I found cadaver to be useful in
> dealing with WebDAV shares.  Gives you kind of an ftp-ish interface to
> navigating the folders.  I haven't jacked around with the FUSE stuff,
> but my impression is that it's the way to go (even if it feels hackish)

Yeah.  Big advantage being that the normal *nix tools
(cp,tar,rsync,mv,etc) all work with it when mounted like a normal FS