NASA To Launch 247 Petabytes of Data Into AWS, But Forgot About Egress Costs Before Lift-Off 121
NASA needs 215 more petabytes of storage by the year 2025, and expects Amazon Web Services to provide the bulk of that capacity. However, the space agency didn't realize this would cost it plenty in cloud egress charges. As in, it will have to pay as scientists download its data. The Register reports: The data in question will come from NASA's Earth Science Data and Information System (ESDIS) program, which collects information from the many missions that observe our planet. NASA makes those readings available through the Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS). To store all the data and run EOSDIS, NASA operates a dozen Distributed Active Archive Centers (DAACs) that provide pleasing redundancy. But NASA is tired of managing all that infrastructure, so in 2019, it picked AWS to host it all, and started migrating its records to the Amazon cloud as part of a project dubbed Earthdata Cloud. The first cut-over from on-premises storage to the cloud was planned for Q1 2020, with more to follow. The agency expects to transfer data off-premises for years to come.
NASA also knows that a torrent of petabytes is on the way. Some 15 imminent missions, such as the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) and the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellites, are predicted to deliver more than 100 terabytes a day of data. We mention SWOT and NISAR because they'll be the first missions to dump data directly into Earthdata Cloud. The agency therefore projects that by 2025 it will have 247 petabytes to handle, rather more than the 32 it currently wrangles. NASA thinks this is all a great idea. And it will -- if NASA can afford to operate it. And that's a live question because a March audit report [PDF] from NASA's Inspector General noticed EOSDIS hadn't properly modeled what data egress charges would do to its cloudy plan. NASA "has not yet determined which data sets will transition to Earthdata Cloud nor has it developed cost models based on operational experience and metrics for usage and egress," the Inspector General's Office wrote. "As a result, current cost projections may be lower than what will actually be necessary to cover future expenses and cloud adoption may become more expensive and difficult to manage."
"Collectively, this presents potential risks that scientific data may become less available to end users if NASA imposes limitations on the amount of data egress for cost control reasons."
NASA also knows that a torrent of petabytes is on the way. Some 15 imminent missions, such as the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) and the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellites, are predicted to deliver more than 100 terabytes a day of data. We mention SWOT and NISAR because they'll be the first missions to dump data directly into Earthdata Cloud. The agency therefore projects that by 2025 it will have 247 petabytes to handle, rather more than the 32 it currently wrangles. NASA thinks this is all a great idea. And it will -- if NASA can afford to operate it. And that's a live question because a March audit report [PDF] from NASA's Inspector General noticed EOSDIS hadn't properly modeled what data egress charges would do to its cloudy plan. NASA "has not yet determined which data sets will transition to Earthdata Cloud nor has it developed cost models based on operational experience and metrics for usage and egress," the Inspector General's Office wrote. "As a result, current cost projections may be lower than what will actually be necessary to cover future expenses and cloud adoption may become more expensive and difficult to manage."
"Collectively, this presents potential risks that scientific data may become less available to end users if NASA imposes limitations on the amount of data egress for cost control reasons."
The Cloud industry (Score:5, Insightful)
It's all about the billing.
You get people coming and going.
You bill them every month they leave data sitting around idle.
If you think Amazon can magically build this cheaper than you can build it yourself, no way. The advantage is you can get started now as well as avoid a huge initial capital investment. But when you pay as you go, you'll pay dearly.
Re:The Cloud industry (Score:5, Insightful)
Build your own can save money. However, you had better have people involved who are used to dealing with data warehouses of this size. It is not trivial. Performance, security and (especially) reliability are all major challenges. This needs to be spread across several locations with fast data links between them. Consideration must be given to how to efficiently replicate across sites, protecting against data loss and allowing optimum servicing of large access requests. To really save money, a hierarchical storage solution will be needed, with offline storage of infrequently needed data. With this kind of scale, there is no substitute for experience.
As against this, it may allow you to build in features that are not available with a generic cloud storage solution
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If you have data warehouses of this size, you had better have people involved with experience period. In this context as well as many other cloud contexts, the skillset required is still going to be needed on the client end.
In some SaaS contexts the hosting service does reduce the client-side skill needed (though I feel like this is mostly a failing of software development in giving up on making their software easy to deploy and has gotten worse as of late).
When it comes to the geographically distributed i
If they could put a man on the moon... (Score:2)
I would think that NASA would be able to implement this. They have an obligation to keep the data we paid for safe and freely available. If now, we should get rid of them.
Re:If they could put a man on the moon... (Score:4, Insightful)
So my point was that 'but if you bring it inhouse, you need to have the skillset' doesn't work in this context, because you would need to have the skills in house either way.
I agree that NASA should be able to do it without AWS, but further that AWS isn't really saving NASA from requiring skills.
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This is it right here.
Contracting out can be done for a variety of reasons. Specialization is one of the better ones. Most organizations have no concept of handing such large amounts of data.
There's nothing 'wrong' with paying people to do things. I don't change my own oil in my car. I don't install my own windows in my house. I've contracted out for those. Even though, I'm pretty sure I could figure it all out. My employer contracts out its physical security. They contract out their building management...
T
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This is it right here.
Contracting out can be done for a variety of reasons. Specialization is one of the better ones. Most organizations have no concept of handing such large amounts of data.
There's nothing 'wrong' with paying people to do things. I don't change my own oil in my car. I don't install my own windows in my house. ....
Sure, but let's not forget that there's no reason that this couldn't be done less expensively by making this a scientific community effort. There needs to be public domain open archives, and with open, community oversight. Academic institutions and public institutions need to develop public grass roots distributed infrastructure or the economic elites will continue to control the very tech we've come to depend upon.
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NASA has been warehousing their own data for years. It's just that for some reason this year, management forgot that rental tends to cost more than owning over the long term.
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They already have the people to do this as they have been hosting large amounts of data already. From the summary "NASA operates a dozen Distributed Active Archive Centers (DAACs) that provide pleasing redundancy." They are currently managing 32 petabytes but someone decided that it would be a good idea to move it to AWS without reading all of the fine print. Oops.
It was a matter of increasing their storage capability and possibly adding networking bandwidth between facilities.. They already had the all of
Once your data is in AWS or Any cloud service (Score:5, Interesting)
they have you by the short and curlies. Easy to upload. Costs several arms and legs to download.
To the likes of Amazon and Microsoft this makes it really,really expensive for companies to jump ship to another provider.
All the time, your base costs will rise and rise and rise.
Perhaps it is time for those bean counters everywhere to think again. You can't just change a Cloud provider like you can a cleaning or transport company. Perhaps it is time for on premises cloud to be re-evaluated?
In this time of uncertainty, I don't think that it will be too long before a company that is 100% based in AWS goes bust and is potentially bought out by one that is 100% in Azure only to find that the costs of moving the data from one to the other exceeds the net worth of the company that went broke.
but if you are Microsoft or Amazon or any other decent cloud provider, you are sitting pretty right now. Your revenue stream is pretty solid unless thousands of your customers go broke...
Re:Once your data is in AWS or Any cloud service (Score:4, Insightful)
"unless thousands of your customers go broke..."
Hang on there. It would take an international crisis....
Oh wait.
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Re: Once your data is in AWS or Any cloud service (Score:1)
It's almost as if there is a larger lesson about to be learned about not outsourcing your supply chain....
Re:Once your data is in AWS or Any cloud service (Score:5, Funny)
"Amazon deletes 20 years of research because the auto-pay creditcard was declined".
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I don't understand how NASA could not fully understand AWS charging scheme before using it.
I'm just a casual home user, and I recently migrated my offsite backups (a couple of TB) from a hard drive in my bank's safe deposit box to S3. Their new "Glacier deep archive" is ridiculously cheap, so it only costs me a fraction of my old safe deposit box fee per year.
However, even I know that to actually read out and download that data, it would cost me about as much as buying a whole new hard drive of that capaci
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I don't understand how NASA could not fully understand AWS charging scheme before using it.
Makes perfect sense to me. You are spending your own money; They are spending somebody else's.
Sysadmins probably knew this beforehand (Score:5, Insightful)
This doesn’t seem like a situation where “the cloud” is going to save you money over running your own infrastructure. But I’m sure the middle managers didn’t seriously listen to what the sysadmins had to say on the subject, assuming they ever talked to them at all.
Re:Sysadmins probably knew this beforehand (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, IMO if you have enough data to fill a datacenter, it would be cheaper to have your own than pay someone else to rent space.
Cloud works for small things - putting 100GB in the "cloud" is cheaper than buying my own server because the cloud provider can use split one server between multiple customers. On the other hand, if I need an entire server, I might as well buy one and only pay for colocation. If I need a datacenter, well, it would be better to have my own.
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I see your point, but I think that if you need but one server, you are better in the cloud. It's when you get to a couple of racks full that the costs might turn into your favor. But even then, I doubt it will save you all that much.
Why?
There is more to running a server than the cost of the hardware and a place to put it.
Cloud providers can be lower costs because they provide software licenses, networking support, hardware maintenance and multi-site redundancy that is pretty darned expensive to do when
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Buying two servers and renting colocation in two datacenters would most likely be cheaper over time than renting the same amount of power in the cloud, since renting means I buy the server for the provider and also pay for profit.
Of course, if the traffic is very spiky and the servers stay idle most of the time, then yeah, probably renting would be cheaper.
In this case, however, the 250PB of data is going to be stored on lots of hard drives that will not be storing data for other customers, meaning that NAS
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Hire someone like Backblaze to build you out on-premesis if you don't think your IT can handle it.
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This doesn’t seem like a situation where “the cloud” is going to save you money over running your own infrastructure. But I’m sure the middle managers didn’t seriously listen to what the sysadmins had to say on the subject, assuming they ever talked to them at all.
I guarantee this is what happened. The exact same scenario played out where I used to work, and indeed we were all going, "What about the bandwidth?" and they just sort of ignored us.
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I guarantee this is what happened. The exact same scenario played out where I used to work, and indeed we were all going, "What about the bandwidth?" and they just sort of ignored us.
Asking the in-house sysadmins what they think about moving to the cloud is a bit like asking in-house developers what they think about outsourcing or what the support staff thinks about a chat bot AI, whatever legitimate concerns they have is going to get mingled with very self-serving arguments. If you work in IT you've probably worked on automating processes and there's always people who claim to be essential and that workflows need the human touch when in reality it doesn't or the problems it causes can
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It's not the actual cost to move the data (in terms of electricity, floor space rental, hardware leasing, etc), it's what the provider can charge before the customer blinks. It's got nothing to do with faster lines or moving the processing load around, or cache..
AKA charge what the market will bear. Those folk at Amazon, Azure, et al aren't stupid. They know where to apply charges to maximise revenue. It's not in the storage, it's in the move-data-set-A-to-location-Z where they can make some $$$
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The bigger problem is nobody seems to know what the actual cost is, regardless of the "calculators" and "estimators' cloud vendors provide. The pricing models are so convoluted and fine grained that you literally don't know what you might spend.
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The admins that were maintaining the in-house or colo'd systems will have a reasonably good idea what it costs, and will also know that Amazon pays a lot less given the bulk discounts on hardware, bandwidth, etc. that they almost certainly get.
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Asking the in-house sysadmins what they think about moving to the cloud is a bit like asking in-house developers what they think about outsourcing or what the support staff thinks about a chat bot AI, whatever legitimate concerns they have is going to get mingled with very self-serving arguments.
You would take what they say with a grain of salt, and you don't need to give them a say in the end decision; but any objections they raise (which I guarantee would include noting the costs of actually getting at the data, plus a knowledge of just how much data needs to be stored) would educate a smart middle manager regarding what questions they need to ask the cloud provider. If you can't actually get valid answers to the objections the sysadmins raise, then the objections are legitimate rather than just
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Of course, asking the in-house sysadmins is also like asking a neurosurgeon if Bubba the auto mechanic would be a good choice to remove your brain tumor, He's pretty sure the saw he bought at Home Depot last year can get through your skull OK and he says he can do it for a hundred bux.
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This probably wasn't driven by middle managers as much as upper management who loved the sales pitch and have told them to implement this new cloud thing they have been hearing about.
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Beware folks missing "Cloud Migration" on their resumes
Resemblance (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Resemblance (Score:5, Insightful)
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Look at Cern (Score:5, Informative)
Maybe they should have asked Cern how they managed their 200PB storage surface two+ years ago: https://indico.cern.ch/event/6... [indico.cern.ch]
I can't imagine it being more expensive than Amazon. They realize Amazon is in this business for profit, right? I think nowadays you can fit that much data in a couple racks; make that 6 racks in different data centers for redundancy with ie Ceph.
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Once again, the managers listen to the beancounters instead of the scientists.
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Oh right they work for the government!
Just my 2 cents
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Why should we listen to you, if you have only 2 cents? What kind of a bean counter are you??
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Any half decent bean counter could have told them that rental only makes sense for short term temporary needs.Beyond that it gets more expensive than owning fast.
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Just imagine the kick backs you as a politician would miss out on with this in-house crap, additionally they use unacceptable commie open source software...
America First!
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Well if you go with a GPFS storage appliance (either the IBM ESS or Lenovo DSS offering basically the first is PowerPC the second is x86) then you can get ~5.5PB in a rack, so you are looking at somewhere around 50 racks in total. That's with 16TB spinning disks. I am not sure 16TB disks are an option yet, but I am just scaling up from the system at work.
From an administration perspective it's a basically a doddle, *if* you are an experienced in GPFS. Put another way 50 racks of ESS/DSS is not that much dif
Amazon "Hidden" Billing (Score:5, Informative)
The problem is that if you've never used AWS before then you don't even know what questions to ask and there are endless pages in different places that describe billing costs that AWS has effectively highly obfuscated the real costs which is only a step away from making the costs secret.
And don't even get me started on that piece of shit hair pulling cost explorer tool they give you. It is just good enough that it feels like all the information you;d need is there... until you need it.
AWS of course won't help you calculate your real costs up front before you put your foot in the fire.
Feel the burn!
Re:Amazon "Hidden" Billing (Score:5, Insightful)
Glad it's not just me. I only use S3 for backup and some small personal projects but the bills I just incomprehensible. Usually they're small enough for me not to care but trying to track down a sudden increase in fees is a nightmare.
Still, NASA should've done their research. If they can send a rover to Mars, they should be able to send an MBA into the Cloud.
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Glad it's not just me. I only use S3 for backup and some small personal projects but the bills I just incomprehensible.
If that's all you're using it for, you may be better off with one of two other options:
Backblaze B2 has an API, and is $5/TB/month. They're also pretty good about prorating the billing; you pretty much pay for the days stuff is on the server. It's fast, they don't charge for either uploads or downloads, and it's got all the expected security things.
The other option I've used with good success is Wasabi. At $4.90/TB/month, they're a hair cheaper than Backblaze, but the bigger draw is that they use the same A
WTF?? (Score:2)
Forgive me, as I'm not insane enough to ever use a "cloud", but... *EGRESS CHARGES*??
How is that not the first think that would stop anyone form ever using it, with those criminal hostage-taking shakedown rules??
And how would that work anyway?
What's the difference from it serving a website containing the data, or me downloading the data via whatever this egress pathway is?
This is nuts. End-stage crapitalism. Shoot the horse, it's got pustules coming out of the tentacles coming out of its neck!
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It's not different from serving a website on AWS, they charge egress for that too.
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Forgive me, as I'm not insane enough to ever use a "cloud", but... *EGRESS CHARGES*??
Is that where they shunt your data out of a side door and you have to pay to go back in through the front entrance again?
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Forgive me, as I'm not insane enough to ever use a "cloud", but... *EGRESS CHARGES*??
Is that where they shunt your data out of a side door and you have to pay to go back in through the front entrance again?
Of course not.. Your data comes back in another side door.. You don't want to clog up the front door with this kind of thing and slow down the entry of new business..
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I think it's traditionally an upper storey window, but essentially yes.
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Seems logical to me. It's totally free for you to give me stuff. Oh, you want it back? Well....
It seems like it would make for a good backup system though, properly encrypted and as one redundant component of course.
Re: WTF?? (Score:2)
Exactly what provider do YOU use that doesn't charge for bandwidth?
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That's the thing with the cloud. You get nickled and dimed to death. It costs you to upload the data, it costs you to keep the data there, it costs to get the data back. It costs to process the data in place.
Just 2 funny (Score:2)
Just my 2 cents
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It's not like AWS is going to warn you about the access charges...
Have you ever tried to make sense of how AWS charges for the services they offer? I dare you, go look at their published costs for all the services you can use and try to figure out what it will cost to do something. Unless you are familiar with everything they are talking about and exactly what your hosted application does with Amazon's services down to the number of bytes of data, at rest, in motion or being transferred here to there by
Are these people really, really stupid? (Score:2)
I mean that is something you find out if you invest 15 min to read the list of costs associated with AWS....
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I mean that is something you find out if you invest 15 min to read the list of costs associated with AWS....
Also, if you spend a few generations denigrating government workers, don't be surprised when people who have options decide to work someplace where they won't get shit upon by 30-40% of the population and one of the major political parties.
In plain english (Score:2)
Oops Oh well they are the government,
"With government, The real surprise is when they do something right!"
Just my 2 cents
Backblaze (Score:3)
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Self-hosted cache? (Score:2)
If NASA has bandwidth to spare, perhaps they could host their own massive caching Squid proxy that uses their AWS data store as a back end. The bigger the cache, the lower the egress charges. Then at least the data storage NASA is responsible for isn't critical - dead drives can just be pulled without regard for data loss.
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I'm sure the rocket scientists at NASA never thought of that.....
Silly NASA (Score:5, Insightful)
Er... NASA helped develop Openstack. They should just put up a Cloud Files SWIFT cluster.
Hereâ(TM)s a hint (Score:1)
Need to consult a "cloud practitioner" (Score:2)
Before making decisions on clouding, you need to speak with someone other than a salesperson from Amazon or a reseller.
It's good to have a "cloud practitioner [amazon.com]" on staff to run your cloud ideas by. This concept of no-cost upload, but high cost retrieval is well known.
However, if your agency heads pushing this contract are doing so for their personal enrichment or their colleagues personal enrichment, then, this doesn't really matter.
NASA going downhill (Score:1)
Welcome to the modified Hotel California (Score:2)
You can check in anytime you like, but you can never leave (unless you pay us a lot of money).
WHA HA HA HA!!!!
Glacial Storage vs. a Tape Robot?
If there were put on LTO-8 15/30TB tapes it would take between 800 and 1600 tapes to hold all of this data.
Roughly $16,000 in tapes + The storage library robots
What ever happened to mageneto optical anyway?
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I once worked with some people who got a big grant that involved collecting some data and analyzing it. One of them walks into my office and says "we're going to be getting X number of datasets and putting them in a database. What kind of server do we need?"
So I pointed to the five year old computer on my desk and said "this machine holds about ten times as much data as you're talking about. So you need any old server, plus a backup strategy."
So they bought a quarter million dollar server and storage array.
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--You forget: that's just for the FIRST copy...
This can't be real (Score:2)
People at NASA can't be this dumb. Worst case solution: charge people to download the data at cost. Yes, that requires a whole login + charging infrastructure.
Re: This can't be real (Score:2)
Forcing people to login to Amazon to download data funded by taxpayers is a non-starter.
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Who said anything about logging in to Amazon?
They'd need to log in to NASA's system and set up a method of payment.
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Re: What happens to your data when you can't pay? (Score:2)
No, they cannot. Because data is intellectual property, not actual property.
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Re: Who owns the data? (Score:2)
Whether the government can access it or not doesn't change the ownership. Physical property ownership is largely determined by possession. Intellectual property ownership is largely determined by its creation.
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Use compression? (Score:2)
Maybe?
Great, irreplaceable data to be lost (Score:1)
Clouds are for chumps.
I wonder ... (Score:2)
..how many satellites forgot to pay their ISP bill.
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only a government bureaucrat... (Score:2)
...wouldn't consider that maybe storing data in a cloud had costs at some point?
[SIGH] NASA, meet Robber Barons, RBs, meet NASA... (Score:2)
Capitalism - how to get to pay blood in order to eat shit, with an additional post-dated charge if you ever fail to confirm how beautiful the experience of eating shit is.
Thatcher (hawk, spit) taught us well. Including that dandified grandson of a whore-monger currently in the White House and planning his 3rd term.
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Re: Good Will (Score:1)
I don't understand why. NASA should juat say "take our data and use it, here is the S3 requester pays fees link". I guess they really aren't that familiar with AWS...
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Note in this case they are probably thinking about NASA internal end users in large part. In this case the funding would be coming from the same bucket. In other words, the current model is that end users have unfettered access to data (because, it's their data and there's no cost associated with retrieving that data from on-prem storage)
But even for external users, it would seem to be a burden to research to make external users pay for access due to the choice of using AWS by NASA.
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Long live Korolev
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For starters they wouldn't need that much storage because the algorithms and data-structures would be more optimized. For the lack of vast hardware resources a frugal software development culture was nurtured in soviet space.
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What?
The Soviets just didn't fly computers or do stuff in software if it didn't fit within the weight limits. What the Soviets were *really* good at was heavy lifting and they still are. In their space program, unlike NASA, they would not try to make things smaller and lighter, they'd just put a bigger rocket under it, or add another engine or two to lift the weight. They flew bailing wire, duct tape and twine compared to NASA and it was heavy stuff. Which is why, to this day, they are the heavy lift ki
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The trap of opex versus capex.
The 'cool' thing in business is to always balk at a hint of capex. They tend to look big and tracking appreciation and depreciation is an accounting burden.
opex? Quick, cheap, and easy to start. Except unlike capex, the costs are relentless.
I have had at least one client walk in and say 'we would rather rent your equipment for 3 years and over the term pay 25% more than purchase price so that we don't have to hold it as capital or justify the purchase to our business upfron
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The hilarious thing is that this dysfunction isn't really lost on anyone. In Microsoft's own Azure training they argue for it because OPEX is easier to justify than CAPEX. That's literally considered a selling point.
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Also, while it is trendy to discuss IT equipment, same applies for real estate. Over the last 5 years the company I work for has leased all of its buildings. The company we are leasing from bought the site specifically for the purpose of leasing to us, so their purchase price is in the public record. At 3 years in, our company had paid as much in leasing as it cost the leasing company to buy the property.
Then they wonder why our expenditures are so high....
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> The company we are leasing from bought the site specifically for the purpose of leasing to us, so their purchase price is in the public record. At 3 years in, our company had paid as much in leasing as it cost the leasing company to buy the property.
Are they thinking of leasing any more properties? Asking for a friend...
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It's hardly trendy. Over 30 years ago the company I worked at which developed, manufactured, and sold an enterprise level played the leasing game. We had a bunch of our own machines in our development data center for engineering and QA to test software changes - but these machines were actually leased. At some point we sold the machines in the lab to a leasing company which turned around and leased them back to us - the machines never moved and were never turned off during the change of ownership and the "i
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The hilarious thing is that this dysfunction isn't really lost on anyone. In Microsoft's own Azure training they argue for it because OPEX is easier to justify than CAPEX. That's literally considered a selling point.
Unfortunately accounting rules means that's often practically true, let's say you buy computers today and you know they'll actually be good for five years but you'll have to write them off in three. In all budgets and profit/loss statements the next three years you'll see no advantage at all, no bonus for your or your boss or the CEO. And in year four, when you say "remember three years ago when I told you to buy and not lease because now we're saving that cost" that will have been forgotten or one of you w
Re: Classic cloud moment (Score:2)
Because with opex, you can just stop paying your bill at any time. Capex, you're already all-in.
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For a startup, it *might* make sense. The reality that most startups utterly fail before the bill exceeds the cost of acquisition is something to consider.
But for so many organizations, they aren't so likely doomed. For example, *NASA* shouldn't be at risk of evaporating tomorrow. Even if it were to discontinue operations, they would still have the mission of maintaining their data for a future time.
Re: Classic cloud moment (Score:2)
Just because NASA isn't going anywhere doesn't mean the project isn't going to get moth-balled at some point. That's the value of opex.