AWS stops promoting Snowmobile truck for cloud migrations

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 stated the corporate could be utilizing the truck to assist prospects speedily switch information to Amazon Internet 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 family” of merchandise now directs customers to its different information transport providers, together with the Snowball Edge, a 50-pound suitcase-sized gadget that may be geared up with quick solid-state drives, and the smaller Snowcone.

An AWS spokesperson stated in an emailed assertion that the corporate has launched cheaper choices for transferring information. Shoppers needed to take care of energy, cooling, networking, parking and safety once they used the Snowmobile service, the spokesperson stated.

“Since we launched Snowmobile in 2016, we have launched many different new providers and options which have made migrating information to AWS even sooner and simpler for our prospects,” the spokesperson wrote.

Snowmobile was priced at $0.005 gigabytes monthly, not together with different prices, in accordance with a web page previously on the AWS web site. For a corporation with 100 petabytes of information — the capability of a Snowmobile — a switch job would price about $500,000 monthly.

Amazon’s resolution to axe Snowmobile comes as Jassy implements price cuts throughout the corporate to deal 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 items. The cuts have continued this yr, with Amazon laying off hundreds of jobs in AWS earlier this month.

Whereas it is pretty routine for AWS and rivals Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform to eliminate services and products, the elimination of Snowmobile stands out as a result of splashy manner 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 hundreds of individuals within the crowd, when the 18-wheeler joined him on stage.

“We’ll want an even bigger field,” Jassy stated, as viewers members rushed to lift their smartphones to seize pictures of the spectacle.

Jassy informed the group why the truck was groundbreaking. Over a ten gigabit-per-second connection, it might take 26 years to maneuver an exabyte, or 1 million terabytes, of information to the cloud, he stated. An AWS buyer might do the job with 10 Snowmobiles in below six months, he stated. Every Snowmobile had a capability of 100 petabytes on exhausting disk drives.

In a blog post coinciding with the launch on Nov. 30, 2016, Amazon cloud evangelist Jeff Barr described Snowmobile as “a ruggedized, tamper-resistant transport container 45 ft lengthy, 9.6 ft excessive, and eight ft broad” that “may be parked in a lined 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 related to a company information middle.

“We intend to ensure that Snowmobile is each sooner 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 stated the corporate used Snowmobile as soon as in 2017 to maneuver greater than 100 petabytes to AWS from its personal servers.

“Since then, we now have been importing our imagery and related information on to the cloud,” the spokesperson stated.

AWS nonetheless leads the enormous cloud infrastructure market and generated $90.8 billion in revenue final yr, accounting for 16% of Amazon’s complete gross sales. The corporate’s spokesperson stated AWS’ Snowball Edge gadgets, which shoppers can return to Amazon by mail after filling them up with information, are smaller than the Snowmobile autos, 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 stated.

“We could not be extra happy with the worth that Snowmobile has delivered to prospects, and we’re happy to see them selecting newer, extra environment friendly applied sciences,” the spokesperson wrote.