Amazon Cloud Unit Kills Snowmobile Data Transfer Truck Service (cnbc.com) 35
At Amazon's annual cloud conference in 2016, the company captured the crowd's attention by driving an 18-wheeler onstage. Andy Jassy, now Amazon's CEO, called it the Snowmobile, and said the company would be using the truck to help customers speedily transfer data to Amazon Web Services facilities. Less than eight years later, the semi is out of commission. From a report: As of March, AWS had removed Snowmobile from its website, and the Amazon unit has stopped offering the service, CNBC has confirmed. The webpage devoted to AWS' "Snow family" of products now directs users to its other data transport services, including the Snowball Edge, a 50-pound suitcase-sized device that can be equipped with fast solid-state drives, and the smaller Snowcone.
An AWS spokesperson said in an emailed statement 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.
An AWS spokesperson said in an emailed statement 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.
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One hallmark of schizophrenia is that they are entirely literal, as in, incapable of metaphor. This guy seems to be incapable of metaphor.
So he may just be schizophrenic.
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And calling a duck a hamster isn't a metaphor.
Well, make that "substitution of vowels" followed by "metaphor" then :-)
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Calling a duck a hamster isn't a metaphor. That's not how it works.
What if it's a duck with big cheeks? Or a duck that you treat in some way like a hamster? Yes, it's a metaphor. That's exactly how metaphor works.
Yes, lack of metaphor is a hallmark of schizophrenia, in fact it's one of the questions they ask to diagnose it, asking to explain the similarities between a list of items (or the item out of place). Schizophrenics will nearly see literal differences, but not similarities in traits.
And yes, they are usually unaware of their issues with metaphor, even when expl
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Just to prove it to you, quick Google search turns up:
"Metaphor Comprehension in Schizophrenic Patients"
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... [nih.gov].
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OK yeah the product is stupid, but the OP was complaining about the name of the product, unironically complaining that it was a metaphor. Something which most product names are!
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As an AWS administrator, it's kind of fun actually.
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Confusing terminology by co-opting accepted terms already in common use.
We're going to name this golf cart "Jet Plane"!
We're going to call this jet plan "submarine"
We're going to name this sailboat "family car".
We're going to make this snowmobile "toboggan"
Sorry. Stupid shit like this makes it impossible to take anything these people say seriously.
Now that I realize how they use terminology, suddenly Amazon's search results make sense. If I really want a Bluetooth keyboard and not some wireless USB keyboard, I should search for FireWire keyboard, and if I really want a wireless USB keyboard, I should search for PS/2 keyboard.
Too unwieldy (Score:2)
An 18-wheeler was overkill.
Everyone knows that they should have used a station wagon.
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Or a tobogan.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Tanenbaum (Score:4, Informative)
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Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway
To think, we're only a few short decades out from when this was how piracy was handled. Boxes full of tapes, rolling down the road between acquaintances. What a difference three decades makes.
Briefcase (Score:4, Interesting)
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It took me a few minutes to find the actual product, no price tag though: https://www.westerndigital.com... [westerndigital.com]
Person of Interest (Score:2)
This was a plot point in Person of Interest. An AI was under attack by another AI, and downloaded itself into a large Pelican case filled with SSDs. At that point the show had kind of gone off the rails, but it was still a cool scene. Also, when they brought it back up (running on a janky supercomputer built out of consumer graphics cards) it was screwed up and didn't run well, which I appreciated, too. I miss that show.
cost of getting your data back out (Score:3)
To get your data into AWS you rent the truck.
To get your data back out of AWS you spend enough to buy the truck.
How does this make sense to anyone? The plan must be to live in AWS forever or abandon the data at some point.
Re:cost of getting your data back out (Score:4, Informative)
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"How does this make sense to anyone? "
They didn't delete their local copy when the imported it into AWS.
Space delivery (Score:2)
Are they still delivering to outerspace? https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/p... [amazon.com]
Useful at the time (Score:2)
While the article mentions that this service was only used a few times, I'm sure it was used for selling the idea of it being easy to transfer a large amount of data to AWS. Picture it:
Potential AWS Customer: I don't know....I have a lot of data, and I'm not sure there's enough bandwidth...
AWS Sales-droid: No worries! I can bring a truckload of storage to your data center and we'll connect it right up and get your data loaded up all nice and quick and secure!
I'm sure that many a CIO had fantasies about being able to say that they had enough data to need a truck to haul it to AWS.
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Full Disclosure: I worked on the physical security of the Snowmobile when it was originally introduced, it was a really fun project.
The idea of the Snowmobile was to enable gigantic transfers of data, in the case of the first customer it was a GIS company with a data lake of 20 years of archived data. They built a fence in the parking lot next to the loading bay, ran some serious fiber to it, put in a bunch of cameras, and Amazon brought a cargo container full of racks of drives and parked it there. They
Number of possilble users was probably small (Score:2)
And they've served all of them now. I mean, how many orgs have THAT much data to begin with, and how many ever need this sort of thing a second time? I imagine it paid for itself for the few who needed it, but there's no point in maintaining and upgrading it once you've got those customers.
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Ultra-high capacity SSD drives have made a device the size of the Snowmobile unnecessary today, what formerly needed a cargo container of spinning platters can now fit in a footlocker.
You'd be surprised how many organizations have the need to move petabytes of data, mostly archival data which is only marginally accessible on stored tapes or tape libraries that break down as they age. Moving it into the cloud can make it available for analysis or ML training, or other usages which were not practical in its
Great for Chia (Score:1)
Heck, I'd love to buy one of these to store Chia seeds :-)