Snowball: Why did Amazon just make a hard drive with a Kindle attached?

By Jamie Carter

Introduction and how it works

In the wireless world of cloud infrastructure and services, Amazon Web Services (AWS) just chucked a curve-ball. Or, rather, a Snowball. A 50TB hard drive weighing 20kg that can be quickly filled with data and posted to AWS for uploading to the cloud, Snowball is said to be a “novelty”, but one that will spread the cloud concept to companies with petabytes of archived data which they perceive to be un-cloudable, as it were.

But can a $200 (around £130, or AU$280) – that’s the rental price of course – slab of hardware like Snowball really be the future of the cloud?

Why does the cloud need Snowball?

The Snowball concept was launched at October’s AWS Re:Invent 2015 event in Las Vegas in front of initially bemused developers, and it does at first seem at odds with the cloud data concept. Why is a cloud and IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) company like AWS suddenly interested in producing bespoke hardware? Because it wants business data in its cloud as quickly as possible, that’s why – and certainly quicker than the internet allows in …read more

Source:: techradar.com – Computing Components