Amazon Web Services (AWS) is reducing the number of Snow Edge compute devices available to customers, killing off the Snowcone line entirely and reducing the range of available Snowball devices.
First launched in 2015, the Snow family of hardware was designed to offer offline data migration to and from AWS data centers.
However, since Snow’s launch, the company said its innovations around data transfer have made moving data to AWS and running workloads at the Edge “faster, more efficient, and more cost-effective,” adding that customers “strongly prefer” online migrations to offline.
Snowcone melts away
The company has discontinued its Snowcone offering this month.
“After careful consideration, we have discontinued the AWS Snowcone service, effective November 12, 2024,” the company said in a blog announcing the changes.
Both new and existing customers can no longer order any Snowcone device, including the Snowcone SSD and Snowcone HDD.
“We will continue to support existing customers with Snowcone devices until November 12, 2025, but strongly encourage these customers to complete their jobs and return the devices,” the company added.
Amazon recommended that any customers with the impacted hardware should complete active jobs and return the older Snowball and Snowcone devices to AWS.
Snowcone was announced in 2020. The original device was just nine inches long, six inches wide, and three inches tall (22.8, 15.2, 7.6cm respectively). The unit weighed 4.5 pounds and included 8TB of usable storage.
A Snowcone unit was taken to the International Space Station in 2022.
Snowball family trimmed
Amazon is also cutting the range of available hardware for its Snowball line of devices.
Effective November 12, 2024, AWS will discontinue three, previous-generation, end-of-life AWS Snowball device models.
Specifically: The Snowball Edge Storage Optimized 80TB device, Snowball Edge Compute Optimized with 52 vCPUs device, and the Snowball Edge Compute Optimized with GPU device.
As with Snowcone, the company said both new and existing customers can no longer order the previous generation of discontinued Snowball device models, and no new orders of the discontinued devices will be processed.
“We will continue to support existing customers that currently have the end-of-life Snowball device models until November 12, 2025, but strongly encourage these customers to complete their jobs and return the devices,” Amazon said.
AWS’ remaining range of Snowball hardware will be limited to two models.
For Edge compute, the Snow service will now only use the latest Snowball Edge Compute Optimized 104 vCPU device. This device offers up to 104 vCPUs, up to 416GB RAM, and is fully SSD with 28TB NVMe storage.
For offline data transfer in situations when bandwidth is limited or a connection is intermittent, the company will offer the Snowball Edge Storage Optimized 210TB device with NVMe storage and the ability to transfer up to 1.5GB of data per second for data migration workloads.
Amazon recommended AWS Outposts – its rack-based on-premise offering – to customers who may have been using Snow hardware for Edge computing use cases. For data migration from a data center to the cloud, the company has its DataSync service.
The original Snowball appliance was launched back in 2015. The ruggedized unit was designed to allow customers to ship data from data centers, offices, or remote locations to AWS facilities (or vice versa).
Amazon retired Snowmobile, which offered offline data transfer via an 18-wheeler truck, earlier this year.
The company announced a rugged Edge appliance only available to the US Department of Defense, known as Snowblade, last year.
