AWS sent edgy appliance to the ISS and it worked – just like all the other computers up there

Amazon Web Services has proudly revealed that the first completely private expedition to the International Space Station carried one of its Snowcone storage appliances, and that the device worked as advertised. The Snowcone is a rugged shoebox-sized unit packed full of disk drives – specifically 14 terabytes of solid-state …

[WhereAmI?]

Ah yes, but the Pis are only toys, whereas as the Snowcone is a real man's computer [/s]

[Sixtiesplastictrektableware]

There's nothing I associate more with masculinity than snowcones.

[big_D]

Yawn...

Snowcone works like... All remote systems in history?

Back in the 80s, I worked for an oil exploration company. They had VAXes installed on their ship to do the on-site data collection and initial processing. The tapes (a few hundred per square kilometer) were then sent back to the data centre for processing on the VAX cluster, where geophysicists would look at the results, write FORTRAN routines to clean them up, then print out hi-res plots for their customers (2400dpi laser plotter, which had its own Olivetti mini-computer as a print server).

The 14TB of SSD storage is an improvement over reel-to-reel tapes (the warehouse near-by had over 1,000,000 tapes in off-site storage, with several thousand on-site).

[Anonymous Coward]

Totally off topic but

it's Friday. My impressive achievement surpasses all this computer in space stuff. I have just got my notoriously tight son (unless he is spending my money of course) to go to the bar and buy a bloody round. A rare sight indeed.

Cheers... Ishy

[Eclectic Man]

Amazon delivery

Did they have to sign for it, and what did they do with the enormous amount of padding and cardboard packaging?

I'll get my coat, it's the one with the Star Trek logo on the left breast.

[Sgt_Oddball]

Re: Amazon delivery

I wonder if they have a prime account for next day delivery?

[David Hicklin]

Re: Amazon delivery

Or did they just fly by and fling it in the general direction of the ISS..

[Will Godfrey]

Desperation

That's how this comes over to me - Oh, and extreme attention seeking.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Desperation

"Blue Origins can't get anywhere near orbit, but finally Bezos has managed to get something up there"

[telveer]

I am amused by the responses from Raspberry and AWS fanbois! It's ridiculous to compare Raspberry Pi to AWS Snowcone. Both are great devices but AWS Snowcone was specifically developed to be shipped to remote locations, where large amounts of data can be collected and even transformed a bit. The unit can be shipped back to AWS, where the full power of AWS cloud services (Sagemaker, EMR and a variety of AI/ML and data crunching tools) can be unleashed on the collected data