AWS stops selling snowmobile trucks for cloud migration | Wilnesh News

exist Amazon’s At the 2016 annual Cloud Conference, the company took the stage driving an 18-wheel vehicle and attracted everyone’s attention. Current Amazon CEO Andy Jassy called it a “snowmobile” and said the company would use the truck to help customers quickly transfer data to Amazon Web Services facilities.

Less than eight years later, the semitrailer was retired.

CNBC confirmed that as of March, AWS had removed Snowmobile from its website and the Amazon unit had stopped offering the service. A webpage dedicated to AWS”snow family’s products now direct users to its other data transfer services, including the Snowball Edge, a 50-pound suitcase-sized device that can be equipped with a fast solid-state drive, and the smaller Snowcone.

An AWS spokesperson said in an emailed statement that the company has introduced more cost-effective data movement options. A spokesman said customers must deal with power, cooling, internet, parking and safety issues when using snowmobile services.

“Since launching Snowmobile in 2016, we have released many other new services and features that make it faster and easier for our customers to migrate their data to AWS,” the spokesperson wrote.

According to a previous page on the AWS website, Snowmobile’s pricing is $0.005 GB per month, excluding other charges. For a company with 100 petabytes of data (equivalent to the capacity of a snowmobile), a transfer would cost approximately $500,000 per month.

Amazon’s decision to kill Snowmobile comes as Jassy implements company-wide cost-cutting measures to deal with sluggish sales growth. Amazon has cut more than 27,000 jobs since the end of 2022 and stopped projects in its device and retail divisions. Layoffs have continued this year, with Amazon cutting hundreds of jobs at AWS earlier this month.

While this is fairly commonplace for AWS and competitors Microsoft sky blue and Google The cloud-based platform sheds products and services, and Snowmobile’s elimination is notable because it was launched in high-profile fashion at the company’s showcase Reinvent conference in Las Vegas in late 2016.

Jassy, ​​who was leading AWS at the time, was delivering a keynote address to an audience of tens of thousands when the 18-wheeler joined him.

“We need a bigger box,” Jassy said as spectators rushed to snap up their smartphones to capture the spectacle.

Jassy tells viewers why this truck is groundbreaking. He said that if the connection speed exceeds 10 gigabytes per second, it will take 26 years to transfer 1 exabyte, or 1 million terabytes, of data to the cloud. AWS customers can do the job with 10 snowmobiles in six months, he said. Each Snowmobile has a hard drive capacity of 100 PB.

in a blog post At the time of its launch on November 30, 2016, Amazon cloud evangelist Jeff Barr described the Snowmobile as “a rugged, tamper-proof shipping container that is 45 feet long, 9.6 feet high, and 8 feet wide.” “Can be parked in covered or covered areas”.

Barr helped convey the simplicity of the process through photos of a Lego-built snowmobile connected to the company’s data center.

“We intend to ensure that Snowmobile is faster and cheaper than using network-based data transfer models,” Barr wrote.

But the product wasn’t a success.

A spokesman for satellite operator Maxar said the company used Snowmobile to move more than 100 petabytes of data from its own servers to AWS in 2017.

“Since then, we have been uploading images and related data directly to the cloud,” the spokesperson said.

AWS still leads the massive cloud infrastructure market, generating $90.8 billion in revenue last year and accounting for 16% of Amazon’s total sales. A spokesperson for the company said that AWS’s Snowball Edge device is smaller and cheaper than the Snowmobile vehicle, and has faster turnaround time. Customers can fill in the data and return it to Amazon via mail.

There is also the AWS DataSync service for mobile data announced in 2018.

“We are extremely proud of the value Snowmobile brings to our customers, and we are pleased to see them choosing newer, more efficient technology,” the spokesperson wrote.