How Amazon put Ukraine's 'government in a box' -- and saved its economy from Russia

[NullTuples]

18. Yay...but this is a product Amazon Web Services offers & it has cost Ukraine 75 million USD so far.

This is not, as far as I can ascertain, Jeff Bezos "doing the right thing" for anyone but Amazon shareholders.

AWS's "snowballs" - essentially a hardened rack of storage servers in a container built to be airlifted - is the modern version of Sneakernet (walking dense storage media because it's faster than a network transfer) or, from the early 1970's PARC, "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes".

https://www.govtech.com/analytics/amazon-works-to-safeguard-critical-data-in-ukraine

I've searched and have found no mention that anyone is paying for this service but the Ukraine government , nor that Amazon is just giving it away.

I am grateful that such a service exists, as it ensures that even if Russia were to take over the structures where Ukraine's data was being stored (thanks to their otherwise very wise "keep Ukraine data in Ukraine" policy), they've not lost the core infrastructure to their government being able to operate or recover when this is over. But these services have existed as long as there has been a need to move giant amounts of data quickly - nearly 50 years that I'm aware of, and probably even further back into the mainframe era.