Hey Amazon, why Amazon Snowball is not elastic too? Yes you can scale it up, but you are never able to scale it down too.
It might be just me but 100 TB seems very large for most of IoT devices. This looks to me like a waste of resources and well, too much of a centralized architecture applied to a field that’s supposed to be decentralized in it’s essence.
Let’s forget for a moment of your “freezing” storage solutions (Amazon Glacier, Amazon Snowball, Amazon Snowball Edge, Amazon Snowmobile) and let’s think of the beautiful spring and the acacia trees. In all the feery of Spring, visualizer the little Bees collecting pollen from the acacia flowers, bit by bit, taking it back to their beehive. What a nice picture and how flavored the acacia honey is!
Now back to our cloud business, let’s get inspired from the tiny little bees. Think of your Amazon Snowball Edge as being the bee’s beehive, able to store up to 100 TB of data (with options for less or for more to make it rather elastic too), abl to support computing tasks via Amazon EC2 apps or AWS Lambada functions preparing the data (our honey) for the cloud migration.
Now think of the Bees!
Those tiny little Bees that go from flower to flower to collect the pollen (our tiny bits of row data). Design them, make them work with any standard embaded microprocessor, make them as IoT friendly as possible, with the goal of each small IoT device (the flowers) to be served by a little bee that collects the data from it. You don’t even need to make the little bugs fly, they could use a NB-IoT network to send the data to the Beehive Edge that will process it and store it in the cloud.
Just saying…