AWS has discontinued the Snowmobile service. Anyone who wants to move petabytes of data to the cloud today can no longer rely on special vehicles.

AWS has discontinued its Snowmobile offering. Snowmobile was launched in 2016 as a creative solution to migrate massive amounts of data to the cloud. Anyone who has petabytes of data cannot simply transfer it to AWS over the Internet. A one-time physical transfer would be easier in this case, AWS argued. For this purpose, the cloud provider built a fleet of trucks that could transport up to 100 petabytes of data on storage servers.

Better alternatives

Since its launch, AWS says it has developed better alternatives. The system with trucks, naft, drivers, guards and more no longer seems cost effective. Snowball still exists. This service offers the same solution on a smaller scale: data migration is done via a briefcase that you can send by mail. Such portable storage servers are still relevant: Western Digital recently launched its own copy.

AWS states that Snowmobile was not very popular and today there are more interesting methods of migrating data to AWS. It’s not entirely clear what these are exactly. Presumably Snowmobile simply wasn’t as cost-effective as the system required a very complex journey to migrate a limited number of niche providers to the cloud. The vendor lock-in may also have played a role: Anyone who finds that their data cannot reach the cloud without a truck can rightly ask themselves what exit strategy is still possible in the long term.