Amazon Is Launching Pay-As-You-Go Cloud Computing In Space

At its annual re:Invent conference in Seattle this week, Amazon unveiled a service that lets owners of satellites rent time on Amazon-managed ground stations to send and receive data from orbit. "The service, called AWS Ground Station, works in much the same way as Amazon's well-established business for tapping computing capacity via the cloud," reports MIT Technology Review. From the report: According to an AWS blog post, big businesses with a large number of satellites typically build and operate their own ground stations at a cost of a million dollars or more for each one. Smaller companies that can't afford their own often end up signing inflexible, long-term contracts with third parties that own and run such stations. The new service will let satellite operators get access to a ground station at short notice on a pay-as-you-go basis. Those who know how much capacity they will need well in advance can book ahead and pay less for downlink time. AWS is kicking off with a pair of ground stations and says it will have a total of a dozen up and running by the middle of next year. It will monitor how demand develops before deciding how many more stations to add.

Re:

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

If i reply to this, the bot generator will take the random phrases it posted as mildly successful, and use them to help generate the next round of slightly less random technobabble.

Misleading

[Anonymous Coward]

Not computing time per se, but flexible downlink time is the product.

Las Vegas

[bondsbw]

Not Seattle.

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[Lennie]

I'm still amazed when people say airbnb is so innovative:

https://www.couchsurfing.com/ [couchsurfing.com]

I'll wait

[rossdee]

until they invent FTL comunications

Re:

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

The government should provide a public access interface to their panopticon of facial recognition, gait, and automobile trackers so you can punch in a name and track whoever you want live.

There is no putting the Genie back in the bottle, so the only thing to do is neuter the government's advantage by letting all in on it.

space computing

[sad_]

cloud computing is so last year, space computing man, that's where it's at!

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[l0n3s0m3phr34k]

Cisco actually has a Visio icon for their Space Router. [cisco.com] PACKETS!!! IN SPAAAAAACE!!

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[R3d M3rcury]

That's the next line of patents: Do something common, but in space.

There. I just patented Quick Sort...in space!

I work for a large broadcast company - this is ver

[MarkH]

Managing global downlink centres is a big and expensive business. You need diversity for not just resilience but also local weather conditions.

With only 2 downlink nodes for now not too useful except to experiment with. Also a lot depends on the quality control systems in place to manage signal acquisition and correction plus seemless switchover modes supported.

But definitely one for mix. Could open market for smaller rebroadcasters to consume sport 'world feeds' into OTT services without physical setup.

The main use of "pay-as-you-go" hosting

[l0n3s0m3phr34k]

Seems to be criminals who load up pre-made images of scanning / cracking distros; they run them for awhile then the instance disappears. I bet that a huge amount of these are also paid using someone else's stolen accounts. When I look at my firewall logs, many are from Azure, AWS, etc and the host no longer even exits.