Cloud computing is taking over. Demand continues to rise from both
companies and consumers that rely on remote storage and computing
power accessible from anywhere. Tech giants Google, Microsoft, IBM and
others are vying to be the go-to providers. But one company has
remained the leader, Amazon. AWS has a commanding lead
in the cloud right now. In fact, if you add up number two,
three, four and five, they add up to what AWS does. Amazon Web Services is behind a
lot of the technology we use. From calling a Lyft to checking
your video doorbell, to streaming your favorite shows. When people are watching a Prime
movie, or they're watching a Netflix movie, or a Hulu movie, or others
like that, they're watching it and streaming off of
Amazon Web Services. The Super Bowl streams off us and
also Major League Baseball and now NASCAR and Formula One
racing as well. If you use Intuit to do
your taxes, that runs on AWS. AWS has been one of
Amazon's most profitable business endeavors. Last year AWS generated more
than $25 billion in sales. Plus, they're still growing
like a weed. Get this, they're up 47%. In the first quarter of this
year, revenue climbed to $7.7 billion, up from $5.44 billion a year earlier. We have over 2.2 million customers using AWS today. They're usually big companies like
Goldman Sachs or Capital One. There's over 4,000 government agencies
that run on us today. Companies left and right are abandoning
their own data centers for Amazon's or other cloud providers. But moving all of that data
online can be a challenge. The transfer fees for moving data over
the network online can be quite high. And also, it can take a
while if you have petabytes and petabytes and petabytes or
yottabytes of data. So Amazon built physical products
to make transferring large amounts of data easier. A portable data transfer device capable
of operating in a war zone, called Snowball. And even a giant truck called
Snowmobile to help companies migrate their data to the cloud. What about if I
have exabytes of data? We have a lot of customers
who have exabytes of data. And the first thing that came to
mind was, we're going to need a bigger box. So why would a company need to
move to a cloud service provider like AWS? Most of our customers save between
22 and 54 percent versus running all in, building their own data
center, building their own networks, powering it, having people
to operate it. One of the biggest reasons that people
look to the cloud is not necessarily cost, but
around flexibility. Developers can get access to massive
amounts of compute and storage and networking resource. AWS says it has the largest
global infrastructure footprint of any cloud provider, meaning it has data
centers placed in regions around the globe where there
is concentrated demand. It has the capacity to allow companies
to tap into more server space depending on their needs. When they have a big retail day
they can use a million servers, when their normal load is, say, 40
or 50 or 60 servers. And so the ability to do that
is astronomically expensive to do on Prem. And that's why you see the
startups growing so fast on AWS because they get the access to
a Fortune 500 infrastructure for pennies on the dollar. Netflix, for example, has always used
Amazon as its cloud provider. But for a company that wants to
migrate its data to the cloud, typically a massive data transfer
needs to take place. Some companies have hundreds of
terabytes, petabytes and even exabytes of data. For some perspective and how big that
is, your average MP3 song is about three megabytes. A gigabyte is about a 1,000
megabytes, or around 300 songs. A terabyte is about a
1,000 gigabytes, or 300,000 songs. A petabytes is 1,000 terabytes, or
300 million songs, and an exabyte is around a 1,000 petabytes,
or 300 billion songs. A single MP3 file might take a
few seconds to transfer over the internet. 300 million or billion,
however, might take a while. It's often called in IT the
python eating a pig problem. So if you imagine a python, you
can visualize it eating a pig. You get this big lump that you
have to move through the python. So you have a little network and you've
got a big lump to move and so for some of our customers it would've
taken them years and years to upload their data
over their network. Amazon has tried to solve this problem
of cost and time by creating really tough hardware, called Snowballs,
which people who operate data centers can connect
their infrastructure to. Make copies of the data and then
send those snowballs to AWS data centers so that the data
can be moved more quickly. The smallest storage Snowball we
have is about 50 terabytes. That's 5,000 DVDs and the largest
snowballs we have is between 11,000 and 14,000 DVDs depending on
how you compress it. We work with our Lab 126 folks
on the industrial design, our Kindle folks on the e-ink label. So imagine if you're shipping hundreds
of these, you could easily put the wrong label, put them
in the wrong box. That doesn't happen,
it's all automated. It knows where it's going
and it labels itself. And my boss, Charlie Bell, worked
on the Space Shuttle and we actually used some things off the
Space Shuttle where they have to handle the shock of
launch and landing. Vass said designing the Snowball to
withstand the rigors of transit was not an easy task, since it had
to be highly durable as well as less than 50 pounds. We actually went to our shipping partners
and we also went to the fulfillment center and
talked to them. So from that we learned a really hard
problem to solve is that it had to be under 50 pounds. We also wanted people to be able
to check it as regular luggage. And that's actually a hard design
constraint, to make something as durable as that and as dense compute
and storage, in under 50 pounds. The Snowball even passed an explosives
test and meets the military's requirements for being airdropped. To meet the specifications, we have
to drop the Snowball from 28 feet, 80 times, on all four
corners and all six sides. And then because we build it so
robustly, we are able to also pass the DoD 901 Barge Explosive Test, where
you have 83 pounds of plastic explosive going off 20 feet
from the device multiple times. Which is a tremendous percussion wave
that would turn your insides to jello. If you were standing
there it would kill you. And temperature wise, it's designed
for the most extreme environments. They can operate at really
high temperatures, like 140 degrees ambient temperature and really
cold temperatures, like -20. And it can have unconditioned power
from a generator and it'll continue to operate. For customers calmly transferring data
from the safety of their office, this could all
seem like overkill. But in certain instances,
it's proven critical. When the volcano was going off
in Hawaii, the USGS used the Snowballs. They had local servers and the
lava was coming up on their building. And so they didn't want
to lose all that extremely valuable data they've collected. They also knew the Snowballs
could operate in high temperature environments. And so they shipped
the Snowballs there, downloaded the data and shipped the Snowballs out. And so they were able to capture
all that data without losing it. Oil rigs is another area we
see a lot of them. Military they're very,
very popular. So they're used in
forward deployed units. They're used on Navy ships. They're used in aircraft. They're used in Special Ops
locations all over the world. For cybersecurity, where they're collecting
network data and reacting to it locally. There's even a six micron dust filter
option you can snap on the front. So if you're operating them in
a desert, they can filter the sand out and not have the
sand go into the device. Even Hollywood has started taking
advantage of Amazon's Snow family. For studio shoots, they're shooting in
8K and 12K cameras now. And so that's a lot of data. And so they put it on the Snowballs,
and you can see the screens on the front they're used
for quality control. When they're done with the shoot
they actually ship the Snowball back and it uploads the data into
the cloud and then they post-processing it. There's another, I would call the
upper-sell version, which is the Snowball Edge, and that's
a 100 terabyte solution. Now, the interesting thing about Snowball
Edge is you can actually put compute on there
and actually run workloads. AWS was the first public cloud provider
to make hardware like this for data transfer, but competitors have
since developed similar products. Microsoft is the number two player
in the public cloud market, behind AWS. It has Data Box products that
have room for 1 petabyte of data, making it larger than what
Google and IBM offer today. The Google Cloud, which is behind
AWS and Microsoft Azure, has Transfer Appliance products. Which are storage servers that you can
install inside a rack in your data center. But it's not as popular as
the one that AWS is offering today. But AWS is the only company that
felt like it needed to go even bigger. Snowmobile has the equivalent
of 1,250 Snowballs in it. And so it's what we
call a 100 petabytes truck. To put in context how
much data Snowmobile can take. Let's say the typical
notebook is 500 gigabytes. A 100 petabytes would be 200
million notebooks that get ingested into this Mack truck. Digital Globe had this challenge where
they had a huge amount of satellite imagery. They're one of the largest producers
in the world of satellite imagery. And so it would have taken
them about 10 years to upload it over the network. And they were actually the first
customer that called us and said, hey, can't you just send a truck? And so we built one. We'll drive the truck up
to your data center. We have power and network fiber
that will connect to your data center. Fill 'er up, and then the
truck will come back, put the trailer back on the truck and
we'll move it back to AWS. If you think about the idea of
moving an exabyte of data, if you basically assign a 10 gigabit per second
line to it, which is pretty reasonable, it would take
you about 26 years. Using 10 Snowmobiles, it would take
you a little less than six months. I remember a few years ago, AWS
announced the Snowmobile by driving it onto a stage at an AWS
event and people just went nuts. They were like, what? How could a cloud be a truck? And it was cool. It was innovative. But it's not like we've heard
about the Snowmobile being a huge business hit. It's not like the Snowmobile is
what's making up most of AWS' revenue. Far from it. AWS would not disclose how many
customers have used a Snowmobile to make a transfer, or how many
trucks it has in service. We weren't able to see the inside
of the truck because the technology is safely guarded, but it's essentially
a data center on wheels. Snowmobile uses what Amazon calls
Zero-G racks, which suspend the system from both the top and the
bottom of the truck to handle the impacts while in motion. And it has its
own power and cooling. Once the transfer is complete,
the truck enters transport mode. An armed guard and an escort accompany
the truck as it returns to Amazon's data centers
for the upload. Its location is monitored over
cellular and satellite communications throughout the entire journey. Amazon intentionally left the truck devoid
of branding to keep it discreet. When it connects to
the AWS ingestion center. The data is decrypted and hashed. Validated, and then once the data
is all unloaded and you validated it's unloaded, then the Snowball set
up for another run for another customer. Just as Amazon has disrupted retail
with its e-commerce business, the Snow products are an example of how
the company has become a force to reckon with in the cloud
computing industry as well. They're continually first
with features. They're first with different ways
of doing things, like networking. They have the
most compute variation. They have the widest range
of machine learning offerings too. Two years ago, we deployed
1,440 new products and services. We deployed 1,954, that
was in 2018. I'm sure we will beat that in 2019. So innovation has been a key point. Security has been a key point. Our systems are the only cloud
that's certified to run the intelligence agencies and DoD type
clouds, top secret compartmented level of certification. And we continue to have just a
wide variety with the most number of databases available to our customers
and the most variety of databases. The most robust storage
platforms, the most number of options and compute. In addition to that, we've just
been doing it longer than anybody else. So we have these years
and years of operational excellence and experience behind it.
We need to stage a fast and furious type of heist to get the snowmobile. I doubt my neighbors would mind this parked outside my house.
I wonder which disks they are using that can take so much abuse