Amazon AWS Opens Brick-and-Mortar Stores for High-Bandwidth Data Uploads: Just Bring Your Hard Drive

Amazon AWS's special trucks designed for data transport once sparked widespread discussion. It's clear that for massive amounts of data, physically transporting hard drives to data centers for copying is much faster than uploading over network bandwidth.

👆Amazon AWS's Data Transport Truck

Amazon AWS seems to be continuing this transport ethos, but with a focus on providing ultra-high bandwidth for data uploads. Customers simply need to bring their storage devices to a brick-and-mortar store.

Amazon AWS recently announced the opening of AWS Data Transfer Hubs in New York and Los Angeles, USA. These act like AWS's physical stores, equipped with specialized devices and high-bandwidth networks to transfer data to Amazon S3, Amazon EFS, and other data storage centers.

If you have only 1TB of data, going to a store for transfer might not be worthwhile. Amazon's AWS Data Transfer Hubs are aimed at large data sets. For instance, tech companies might use data collection vehicles in major cities to gather street view data for AI model training, including vast amounts of unstructured data, video, and audio.

New data generated daily could be in the tens or even hundreds of TBs. In such cases, collection vehicles simply need to head to an AWS Data Transfer Hub for rapid cloud uploads, instead of dragging data back to their company for slow uploads over lower bandwidth.

This service isn't free. Usage requires an advance reservation on AWS, with reservations made on an hourly basis. The specific hourly fee is displayed on the reservation interface. Once successfully booked, customers can proceed to the AWS Data Terminal.

👆The Unmarked Office of the AWS Data Transfer Hub

For security reasons, these AWS Data Transfer Hubs are located in ordinary office buildings, without any AWS signage. Customers contact staff by phone upon arrival, and staff then guide users to the data terminal for uploading.

After the operation, customers can verify the data through the AWS console to check for smooth uploads and any data damage. Once data verification is completed, the data can be retained and used.

Amazon plans to open more AWS Data Transfer Hubs in other US cities to meet the large-scale data transfer needs of businesses. Finally, the pricing is based solely on reservation + transfer hours, not on data volume/GB.