Amazon Web Services (AWS) has ceased offering to transport data via an 18-wheeler truck after eight years.
Announced in 2016 by bringing a semi-truck on stage, AWS Snowmobile was a 45 ft, 100 petabyte (100PB) mobile shipping container designed to physically transfer data offline from customer premises to AWS facilities en masse.
However, as of March 2024, AWS had quietly removed Snowmobile from its website.
CNBC has confirmed with Amazon that it has stopped offering the service, and the company has also confirmed this to DCD.
An AWS spokesperson us that the company has 'introduced more cost-effective options' for moving data.
Clients had to deal with power, cooling, networking, parking, and security when they used the Snowmobile service, the spokesperson said.
“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,” they said, adding that customers are choosing "newer, more efficient" technologies like AWS DataSync to bring their data to AWS.
The webpage devoted to AWS’ Snow family of products now directs users to its other data transport services, including its smaller Snowball and Snowcone data transfer appliances.
The HDD-equipped Snowmobile was designed to move exabytes of data to AWS’ cloud “in a matter of weeks.”
It was billed as an option for companies to move large amounts of data from on-premise data center centers to the cloud faster and cheaper than via the Internet.
The Snowmobile was described as a ruggedized shipping container 45 feet long, 9.6 feet high, and 8 feet wide. AWS said it was water-resistant, climate-controlled, and could be parked in a covered or uncovered area adjacent to the customer’s existing data center.
Each Snowmobile was capable of 1Tbps of data transfer spread across multiple 40Gbps connections; at that speed, a Snowmobile could be filled in around 10 days.
Each container included GPS tracking, with cellular or satellite connectivity back to AWS. The company also offered to arrange for dedicated security guards while the unit was on-premises, and for a security vehicle escort when in transit.
Each Snowmobile consumed around 350kW of AC power; customers without spare capacity could request a generator.
Satellite firm DigitalGlobe – later acquired by Maxar – was a named Snowmobile customer, using the service to move 100PB of satellite imagery to AWS.
CNBC noted Snowmobile was priced at $0.005 gigabytes per month, not including other costs. For a company filling the truck with a full 100 petabytes of data, a transfer job would cost about $500,000 per month.
Cloud security engineer Scott Piper noted earlier this month that all references to the AWS Snowmobile service had quietly been scrubbed from the company’s documents.
AWS introduced its DataSync service in 2018, which helps customers move data between on-premises storage, Edge locations, other cloud providers, and AWS via online data transfer.
For offline transfer, typically used where customers lack sufficient bandwidth, AWS offers Snowball Edge and Snowcone, which the company says offer easier transfer due to lower per-device cost, smaller form factor, and shorter turnaround time. These alternative options are why AWS is no longer offering Snowmobile.
