Amazon Once Moved Data by Truck

In 2016, AWS unveiled Snowmobile: a 45-foot climate-controlled shipping container holding 100 petabytes of hard drives, pulled by a semi and accompanied by drivers, guards and a security escort. You filled it at your data center, AWS drove it to one of its regions and loaded the data into the cloud. Why a truck? The math: 100 PB × 8 bits ÷ 1 Gbit/s ≈ 800 million seconds ≈ 25 years of nonstop uploading. The truck did it in weeks. The quote is from computer scientist Andrew S. Tanenbaum's textbook "Computer Networks", where he paraphrases Dr. Warren Jackson of the University of Toronto (circa 1985): "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway." AWS stopped offering Snowmobile in 2024: customers found it cheaper to upload over the network, and newer migration services made the move faster. ⚡ Wiredeep — the tech you use every day, explained in under a minute. 👉 Follow for more!