Moving 100 petabytes to the cloud by truck: Amazon discontinues "Snowmobile"

More than seven years after introducing specialized trucks that could transport up to 100 petabytes of data to the AWS cloud, Amazon has discontinued the service. The US company confirmed this to CNBC after the so-called "Snowmobiles" were removed from the associated website. There are now many other options for migrating large amounts of data to Amazon Web Services. Additionally, the service, which cost 0.005 US dollars per gigabyte per month, was apparently not popular enough - in many cases, a single trip was likely sufficient. There are simpler options for further uploads.

Ideal for the move to AWS

Amazon presented the "Snowmobile" on a large stage at AWS re:Invent in 2016. The presentation was made personally by AWS CEO Andy Jassy, who has since been promoted to Managing Director of Amazon. The truck was then ordered to the company's own data center, where it transferred the data via fibre optic cable. To ensure that nothing happened to the data on the way to the AWS cloud server, an armed guard was even included. The whole thing worked according to Andrew Tanenbaum's quote: "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck full of magnetic tape."

It is not known how much interest there was in the data trucks, but CNBC has identified at least one customer: US satellite operator Maxar used the service in 2017 to transport more than 100 petabytes from its own servers to AWS. The Snowmobile was "the ideal solution for that moment" in the company's history, according to a spokesperson quoted by the US broadcaster. Since then, however, satellite images and other data have been uploaded to the AWS cloud via the internet, so the trucks are no longer needed. Other customers are likely to have followed a similar approach. Although the trucks are no longer in operation, Amazon offers various services for similar projects as part of the so-called "Snow Family."

(mho)