Amazon Extends Data Portability and Closes Loop

Amazon announced on its AWS Blog that customers can now export data from Amazon S3 just as easily as they can import it, thereby extending data portability by closing the import/export loop. The addition essentially completes the AWS Import/Export service offering, which was initially announced in May.

At that time, Amazon only offered a way to import data by shipping data directly to Amazon. The process was as simple: "We'll take your storage device, load the data into a designated S3 bucket, and send your hardware back to you. The data load takes place in a secure facility with a high-bandwidth, low-latency connection to Amazon S3. Once the data has been loaded into S3, you can process it on EC2, and store the results anywhere you'd like - back into S3, in SimpleDB, or on EBS volumes."

The new export service maintains simplicity and the same level of customer service. It's a similar process where "you prepare a MANIFEST file, email it to us, receive a job identifier in return, and then send us one or more specially prepared storage devices. We'll take the devices, verify them against your manifest file, copy the data from one or more S3 buckets to your device(s) and ship them back to you. A 'specially prepared' storage device contains a SIGNATURE file. The file uniquely identifies the Import/Export job and also authenticates your request."

The cost is based on a fixed fee and a variable price. It's $80 per device, plus $2.49 per hour for the time needed to copy the data to your device.

Amazon lists some examples of use cases such as disaster recovery, data retrieval, data distribution and data processing. It's good to see Amazon continue to meet customer expectations by delivering services in a short amount of time after initially announcing them. This should prove to be a popular service choice for customers.