- Less than eight years after unveiling the snowmobile at its Reinvent conference in Las Vegas, Amazon has retired the 18-wheeler.
- Amazon Web Services designed Semi to help customers move large amounts of data to the cloud.
- Pages on the AWS website dedicated to products for large-scale data migration no longer mention Snowmobile.
At Amazon’s annual cloud conference in 2016, the company drove an 18-wheeler on stage to get the crowd’s attention. Andy Jassy, the current CEO of Amazon, calls it a snowmobile, and the company is using the truck to help customers quickly transfer data to Amazon’s facilities on his web service. Said to use it.
Less than eight years later, the Semi ceased operations.
As of March, AWS removed Snowmobile from its website and its Amazon division stopped providing the service, CNBC confirmed. A webpage featuring AWS’s Snow family of products currently features the company’s other data transfer services, including the Snowball Edge, a 50-pound suitcase-sized device that can include high-speed solid-state drives, and the smaller Snowcone. guiding users. .
An AWS spokesperson said in an emailed statement that the company has introduced more cost-effective options for moving data. A spokesperson said customers had to deal with power, cooling, networking, parking and security when using the snowmobile service.
“Since introducing Snowmobile in 2016, we have released many new services and features that make migrating data to AWS even faster and easier for our customers,” the spokesperson wrote.
An AWS snowmobile truck appears in a Seattle parking lot in 2019.
According to a previous page on the AWS website, Snowmobile was priced at 0.005 gigabytes per month, not including other costs. For a company with 100 petabytes of data (the capacity of a snowmobile), a transfer job costs about $500,000 per month.
Amazon’s decision to eliminate snowmobiles comes as Jassy implements company-wide cost cuts to combat sluggish sales. Amazon has cut more than 27,000 jobs and canceled projects in its devices and retail divisions since the end of 2022. The layoffs continue this year, with Amazon laying off hundreds of employees at AWS earlier this month.
It’s common for AWS and rivals Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform to discontinue products and services, but this was introduced in spectacular fashion at the company’s showcase Reinvent conference in Las Vegas in late 2016. The discontinuation of the Snowmobile stands out.
Jassy, who was leading AWS at the time, was giving a keynote speech to a crowd of tens of thousands when an 18-wheeler joined him on stage.
“We’re going to need a bigger box,” Jassy said as spectators scrambled to take photos of the scene with their smartphones.
Jassy told the audience why this track was groundbreaking. With a 10 gigabit per second connection, it would take 26 years to move one exabyte, or 1 million terabytes, of data to the cloud, he said. He said AWS customers told him he could do this work with 10 snowmobiles within six months. The capacity of each snowmobile’s hard disk drive was 100 petabytes.
In a blog post accompanying the Nov. 30, 2016 announcement, Amazon cloud evangelist Jeff Barr described the snowmobile as a “45-foot long, 9.6-foot tall, 8-foot wide rugged, tamper-evident transport vehicle. “container” and explained that “you can park there.” A covered or uncovered area adjacent to an existing data center. ”
Barr used a photo of a snowmobile built with Lego connected to a company’s data center to help convey the supposed simplicity of the process.
“We intend to ensure that Snowmobile is faster and less costly than using network-based data transfer models,” Barr wrote.
However, the product did not catch on.
A spokesperson for satellite carrier Maxar said the company used Snowmobile once in 2017 to move more than 100 petabytes from its own servers to AWS.
“Since then, we have been uploading images and associated data directly to the cloud,” the spokesperson said.
AWS still leads the huge cloud infrastructure market, generating $90.8 billion in revenue last year and accounting for 16% of Amazon’s total sales. AWS’ Snowball Edge devices, which customers can fill with data and then ship back to Amazon by mail, are smaller, cheaper and faster to deliver than Snowmobile vehicles, a company spokesperson said.
There is also the AWS DataSync service for data movement, which was announced in 2018. The company says it is generally more economical for customers to send their data online to AWS than using Snowmobile.
“We couldn’t be more proud of the value our snowmobiles bring to our customers, and we’re happy to see them choosing newer, more efficient technology,” the spokesperson wrote.
clock: How Amazon Web Services transfers large amounts of data to the cloud
