Amazon.com has become a household name. Thanks to unbeatable prices and fast delivery, many have come to depend on Amazon’s great service for many household items in the form of Amazon Web Services. Due to increasing demand, Amazon continues to expand the type of services they offer and are responsible for a growing job market. Amazon’s latest project includes Amazon Snowball, a physical infrastructure to facilitate large-scale data migration, which will heavily depend on the use of truckload carriers. This recent announcement is great news for truck drivers, as it means a growth in the job market.
Amazon Web Services
In 2006, Amazon.com established Amazon Web Services, a number of cloud services or remote computing for website applications. The goal was to make it easier for clients to store, access, and compute large amounts of data through remote access. Due to large amounts of data, it can take clients anywhere from 1-2 months to download backups or retrieve much-needed files. “Even with high-speed Internet connections, it can take months to transfer large amounts of data. For example, 100 terabytes of data will take more than 100 days to transfer over a dedicated 100 Mbps connection. That same transfer can be accomplished in less than one day, plus shipping time, using two Snowball appliances.”
Clients who needed to quickly access their data were left with long delivery times. Now, however, Amazon is taking data delivery to a whole new level with the announcement of Amazon Snowball.
Trucking Service and AWS Snowball
In short, Amazon has made it easier for clients to access large amounts of data without having to wait for lengthy download times. By using large-scale trucking services to physically deliver cases of data, they have cut down delivery times from months to days.
The tech giant is now using physical trucks to move data across the country instead of over the internet. AWS Snowball uses 45-foot trailers to visit businesses across the nation and deliver much-needed data.
Amazon states: “With Snowball, you can transfer hundreds of terabytes or petabytes of data between your on-premises data centers and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). AWS Snowball uses Snowball appliances and provides powerful interfaces that you can use to create jobs, transfer data, and track the status of your jobs through to completion. By shipping your data in Snowballs, you can transfer large amounts of data at a significantly faster rate than if you were transferring that data over the Internet, saving you time and money.”
AWS Snowball Delivery
Truck drivers will be sent to locations, plug into the servers and transfer up to 100 petabytes of data onboard. When finished, they will drive back to Amazon data centers and do it all over again. Clients will no longer be forced to wait months to download critical data, but instead, they’ll receive their shipments within a week’s time.
To understand how much data is being delivered, consider that one petabyte is 1 million gigabytes. Amazon says that they can ship one exabyte, or 1,000 petabytes, of data in six months. Normally, this would take 26 years to do over an online connection.
It’s anticipated that AWS Snowball will open up new driving jobs and opportunities with one of the world’s largest companies. In addition, drivers will adapt to new technical skills and make it possible for various carriers to add a variety of new jobs to the industry.
For more information on trucking services or how to become a driver, contact Beacon Transport!
