Amazon Net Companies Snowmobile Truck
CNBC
At Amazon’s annual cloud convention in 2016, the corporate captured the group’s consideration by driving an 18-wheeler onstage. Andy Jassy, now Amazon’s CEO, known as it the Snowmobile, and mentioned the corporate can be utilizing the truck to assist prospects speedily switch information to Amazon Net Companies services.
Lower than eight years later, the semi is out of fee.
As of March, AWS had eliminated Snowmobile from its web site, and the Amazon unit has stopped providing the service, CNBC has confirmed. The webpage dedicated to AWS’ “Snow household” of merchandise now directs customers to its different information transport companies, together with the Snowball Edge, a 50-pound suitcase-sized machine that may be geared up with quick solid-state drives, and the smaller Snowcone.
An AWS spokesperson mentioned in an emailed assertion that the corporate has launched more cost effective choices for transferring information. Shoppers needed to take care of energy, cooling, networking, parking and safety once they used the Snowmobile service, the spokesperson mentioned.
“Since we launched Snowmobile in 2016, we have launched many different new companies and options which have made migrating information to AWS even quicker and simpler for our prospects,” the spokesperson wrote.
An AWS Snowmobile truck seems in a Seattle car parking zone in 2019.
Andrew Evers | CNBC
Snowmobile was priced at $0.005 gigabytes per 30 days, not together with different prices, in response to a web page previously on the AWS web site. For an organization with 100 petabytes of knowledge — the capability of a Snowmobile — a switch job would price about $500,000 per 30 days.
Amazon’s choice to axe Snowmobile comes as Jassy implements price cuts throughout the corporate to cope with lackluster gross sales development. Amazon has slashed greater than 27,000 jobs since late 2022 and has discontinued tasks within the gadgets and retail models. The cuts have continued this 12 months, with Amazon shedding tons of of jobs in AWS earlier this month.
Whereas it is pretty routine for AWS and rivals Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform to do away with services and products, the elimination of Snowmobile stands out as a result of splashy method it was launched on the firm’s showcase Reinvent convention in Las Vegas in late 2016.
Jassy, who on the time led AWS, was delivering his keynote earlier than tens of 1000’s of individuals within the crowd, when the 18-wheeler joined him on stage.
“We’ll want an even bigger field,” Jassy mentioned, as viewers members rushed to boost their smartphones to seize pictures of the spectacle.
Jassy advised the group why the truck was groundbreaking. Over a ten gigabit-per-second connection, it will take 26 years to maneuver an exabyte, or 1 million terabytes, of knowledge to the cloud, he mentioned. An AWS buyer may do the job with 10 Snowmobiles in underneath six months, he mentioned. Every Snowmobile had a capability of 100 petabytes on arduous disk drives.
In a weblog publish coinciding with the launch on Nov. 30, 2016, Amazon cloud evangelist Jeff Barr described Snowmobile as “a ruggedized, tamper-resistant delivery container 45 ft lengthy, 9.6 ft excessive, and eight ft vast” that “will be parked in a coated or uncovered space adjoining to your present information middle.”
Barr helped to convey the supposed simplicity of the method with pictures of a Snowmobile constructed out of Lego getting linked to a company information middle.
“We intend to guarantee that Snowmobile is each quicker and cheaper than utilizing a network-based information switch mannequin,” Barr wrote.
However the product did not take off.
A spokesperson for satellite tv for pc operator Maxar mentioned the corporate used Snowmobile as soon as in 2017 to maneuver greater than 100 petabytes to AWS from its personal servers.
“Since then, now we have been importing our imagery and related information on to the cloud,” the spokesperson mentioned.
AWS nonetheless leads the large cloud infrastructure market and generated $90.8 billion in income final 12 months, accounting for 16% of Amazon’s complete gross sales. The corporate’s spokesperson mentioned AWS’ Snowball Edge gadgets, which shoppers can return to Amazon by mail after filling them up with information, are smaller than the Snowmobile automobiles, price much less and have a shorter turnaround time.
There’s additionally the AWS DataSync service for transferring information, introduced in 2018. Shoppers usually discover that sending information to AWS on-line is extra economical than utilizing Snowmobile, the corporate mentioned.
“We could not be extra pleased with the worth that Snowmobile has dropped at prospects, and we’re happy to see them selecting newer, extra environment friendly applied sciences,” the spokesperson wrote.
