Amazon cloud unit kills Snowmobile data transfer truck eight years after driving 18-wheeler onstage
Amazon Web Services Snowmobile Truck
CNBC
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.
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.
“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.
An AWS Snowmobile truck appears in a Seattle parking lot in 2019.
Andrew Evers | CNBC
Snowmobile was priced at $0.005 gigabytes per month, not including other costs, according to a page formerly on the AWS website. For a company with 100 petabytes of data — the capacity of a Snowmobile — a transfer job would cost about $500,000 per month.
Amazon’s decision to axe Snowmobile comes as Jassy implements cost cuts across the company to contend with lackluster sales growth. Amazon has slashed more than 27,000 jobs since late 2022 and has discontinued projects in the devices and retail units. The cuts have continued this year, with Amazon laying off hundreds of jobs in AWS earlier this month.
While it’s fairly routine for AWS and rivals Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform to get rid of products and services, the elimination of Snowmobile stands out due to the splashy way it was introduced at the company’s showcase Reinvent conference in Las Vegas in late 2016.
Jassy, who at the time led AWS, was delivering his keynote before tens of thousands of people in the crowd, when the 18-wheeler joined him on stage.
“We’re going to need a bigger box,” Jassy said, as audience members rushed to raise their smartphones to capture photos of the spectacle.
Jassy told the crowd why the truck was groundbreaking. Over a 10 gigabit-per-second connection, it would take 26 years to move an exabyte, or 1 million terabytes, of data to the cloud, he said. An AWS customer could do the job with 10 Snowmobiles in under six months, he said. Each Snowmobile had a capacity of 100 petabytes on hard 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 process with photos of a Snowmobile built out of Lego getting connected to a corporate data center.
“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 didn’t take off.
A spokesperson for satellite operator Maxar said the company used Snowmobile once in 2017 to move more than 100 petabytes to AWS from its own servers.
“Since then, we have been uploading our imagery and associated data directly to the cloud,” the spokesperson said.
AWS still leads the giant cloud infrastructure market and generated $90.8 billion in revenue last year, accounting for 16% of Amazon’s total sales. The company’s spokesperson said AWS’ Snowball Edge devices, which clients can return to Amazon by mail after filling them up with data, are smaller than the Snowmobile vehicles, cost less and have a shorter turnaround time.
There’s also the AWS DataSync service for moving data, announced in 2018. Clients generally find that sending data to AWS online is more economical than using Snowmobile, the company said.
“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.
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee at the Dirksen Senate Office Building on January 31, 2024 in Washington, DC.
Alex Wong | Getty Images
Meta on Tuesday was hit by the European Commission — the executive body of the European Union — with a major investigation into its compliance with the EU’s strict internet content rules.
The Commission said it is investigating Meta over concerns the company hasn’t done enough to ensure effective combatting of disinformation ahead of upcoming European Parliament elections.
The European Parliament elections are due to take place on June 6-9.
In the Commission’s statement Tuesday, it said it suspects Meta is incompliant with DSA (Digital Services Act) obligations regarding tackling deceptive advertisements, disinformation campaigns, and coordinated inauthentic behavior in the EU.
The Commission also said Meta may have infringed the DSA by demoting political content in the recommendation systems of Instagram and Facebook, which it said may have violated transparency requirements.
“We have a well-established process for identifying and mitigating risks on our platforms,” a Meta spokesperson told CNBC via email.
“We look forward to continuing our cooperation with the European Commission and providing them with further details of this work.”
The bloc also took issue with the lack of availability of an effective third-party, real-time civil discourse and election-monitoring tool ahead of upcoming elections to the European Parliament, plus other votes in various individual member states.
It said Meta is in the process of depreciating its CrowdTangle tool, which is a public insights tool enabling real-time election monitoring by researchers, journalists, and civil society through visual dashboards.
For its part, Meta maintains that CrowdTangle is an inefficient election monitoring tool as it lacks enough publicly available data. The company is building new tools on its systems to provide access to more comprehensive data from its platforms.
Potential big fine
Meta is accused of infringing the Digital Services Act, which is a ground-breaking EU law introduced in late 2020 to set out how regulators take a closer eye on tech giants’ content moderation measures as well as efforts to tackle manipulation of elections.
The DSA, which entered into force on Feb. 17, 2024, requires internet giants to give users information on why they’re being recommended certain websites or other details, and the possibility to opt-out.
Ads on those platforms also have to include a label on who paid for them.
The rules also include provisions for ensuring that platforms mitigate risks of election misinformation and manipulation.
Last week, the Commission conducted a “stress test” to test platforms’ readiness to address manipulative behavior in the run-up to elections.
The regulator said it “detected gaps and areas of improvement,” and identified ways to enhance and strengthen cooperation between stakeholders.
Meta qualifies as a Very Large Online Platform (VLOP) under the EU’s DSA law, meaning it faces stricter controls from regulators and potentially heftier fines if it deviates from the rules in the region.
Failure to comply with the rules could lead to fines of up to 6% of the firm’s global turnover and, ultimately, could lead to a temporary ban from operating in the region.
The Commission said it will continue to gather evidence from Meta, for example by sending additional requests for information or conducting interviews and inspections.
The bloc said it can take further enforcement steps including interim measures and non-compliance decisions, if it deems such a step necessary, or accept commitments made by Meta to remedy issues raised in the proceedings.
It hasn’t set a legal deadline for bringing the formal proceedings to an end.
Alan Shaw, CEO, Norfolk Southern
Scott Mlyn | CNBC
Influential proxy advisory firm ISS recommended on Tuesday that Norfolk Southern shareholders support five of activist Ancora’s seven board nominees, withholding an endorsement from CEO pick Jim Barber but describing him as a “credible director and CEO candidate nonetheless.”
ISS’ endorsement, in a report viewed by CNBC, comes one day after Glass Lewis endorsed most of activist investor’s slate of nominees and days after two unions came out in support of Ancora’s proposed management team.
The proxy advisor recommended shareholders support CEO Alan Shaw’s reelection to the board over Barber, but in a rebuke of NSC’s existing governance, it said shareholders should not support current board chair Amy Miles.
Ancora is seeking to oust both current CEO Shaw and newly appointed COO John Orr. The activist holds Shaw accountable for NSC’s historic underperformance relative to peers, and for a disastrous derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, just a few months into his tenure.
Glass Lewis, the other influential proxy advisory firm, said shareholders should support Barber over Shaw in its recommendation Monday. While neither endorsement suggests giving Ancora full control of the board, both provide the dissident with a clear mandate to implement change.
Investors, especially passive index-fund giants like Vanguard and BlackRock, pay close attention to proxy advisors’ recommendations when deciding how to vote their millions of shares. The top three shareholders at Norfolk Southern control more than 16% of shares outstanding.
ISS said in its report that it was clear “that the dissident has presented a balanced slate consisting of qualified nominees, and has generally targeted the appropriate management nominees.”
ISS recommends shareholders support Ancora nominees William Clyburn, Sameh Fahmy, Gilbert Lamphere, Allison Landry and John Kasich.
The proxy advisor said that Norfolk Southern’s governance problems were “most evident” in the board’s failure to communicate with investors and prioritize their “best interests.”
“As board chair, Amy Miles arguably bears the most responsibility for this state of affairs,” ISS’ report read.
Norfolk Southern has taken steps to address investor concerns, including appointing Orr as COO and adding two new directors, former Sen. Heidi Heitkamp and former Delta CEO Richard Anderson. ISS endorsed Anderson’s election but said shareholders should not support Heitkamp.
“There is no evidence suggesting that Heitkamp is in any way unfit to serve, but dissident nominee John Kasich has comparable regulatory and administrative experience,” the ISS report said, mentioning the latter’s “proven ability” to foster compromise.
WATCH: CNBC’s full interview with NSC CEO Shaw on activist campaign
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