Amazon cloud unit kills Snowmobile data transfer truck eight years after driving 18-wheeler onstage

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 clients speedily transfer data to Amazon Web Services amenities.

Less 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 data transport companies, together with the Snowball Edge, a 50-pound suitcase-sized gadget that may be outfitted with quick solid-state drives, and the smaller Snowcone.

An AWS spokesperson mentioned in an emailed assertion that the corporate has launched cheaper choices for transferring data. Clients needed to cope with energy, cooling, networking, parking and safety once they used the Snowmobile service, the spokesperson mentioned.

“Since we introduced Snowmobile in 2016, we’ve released many other new services and features which have made migrating data to AWS even faster and easier for our customers,” the spokesperson wrote.

Snowmobile was priced at $0.005 gigabytes per 30 days, not together with different prices, in accordance with a web page previously on the AWS web site. For an organization with 100 petabytes of data — the capability of a Snowmobile — a transfer 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 deal with lackluster gross sales development. Amazon has slashed greater than 27,000 jobs since late 2022 and has discontinued initiatives within the gadgets and retail models. The cuts have continued this yr, with Amazon laying off hundreds of jobs in AWS earlier this month.

While it is pretty routine for AWS and rivals Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform to do away with services, the elimination of Snowmobile stands out because of the 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 hundreds of individuals within the crowd, when the 18-wheeler joined him on stage.

“We’re going to need a bigger box,” Jassy mentioned, as viewers members rushed to boost their smartphones to seize images of the spectacle.

Jassy instructed the group why the truck was groundbreaking. Over a 10 gigabit-per-second connection, it could take 26 years to maneuver an exabyte, or 1 million terabytes, of data to the cloud, he mentioned. An AWS buyer might do the job with 10 Snowmobiles in beneath six months, he mentioned. Each Snowmobile had a capability of 100 petabytes on onerous 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 shipping container 45 feet long, 9.6 feet high, and 8 feet wide” that “can be parked in a covered or uncovered area adjacent to your existing data center.”

Barr helped to convey the supposed simplicity of the method with images of a Snowmobile constructed out of Lego getting linked to a company data middle.

“We intend to make sure that Snowmobile is both faster and less expensive than using a network-based data transfer model,” Barr wrote.

But 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, we have been uploading our imagery and associated data directly to the cloud,” the spokesperson mentioned.

AWS nonetheless leads the enormous cloud infrastructure market and generated $90.eight billion in revenue final yr, accounting for 16% of Amazon’s whole gross sales. The firm’s spokesperson mentioned AWS’ Snowball Edge gadgets, which shoppers can return to Amazon by mail after filling them up with data, are smaller than the Snowmobile autos, price much less and have a shorter turnaround time.

There’s additionally the AWS DataSync service for transferring data, introduced in 2018. Clients usually discover that sending data to AWS on-line is extra economical than utilizing Snowmobile, the corporate mentioned.

“We couldn’t be more proud of the value that Snowmobile has brought to customers, and we’re pleased to see them choosing newer, more efficient technologies,” the spokesperson wrote.