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 giant's 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 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 lift 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 your
AWS generated more than 25 million in
sales plus they're still glowing like we
give this up 47 percent in the first
quarter of this year revenue climbed to
7 point 7 billion up from 5.4 billion a
year earlier we have over 2.2 million
customers using native yesterday they're
usually big companies like Goldman Sachs
or Capital One there's over 4,000
government agencies that run on this
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 warzone called
snowball and even a giant truck called
snowmobile to help companies migrate
their data to the
what about if I have exabytes the data
we have a lot of customers who have
exabytes of data and the first thing
that came to mind was we're gonna 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
service-based 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 is because they
get 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 thousand
megabytes or around 300 songs a terabyte
is about a thousand gigabytes for
300,000 songs a petabyte is 1,000
terabytes or 300 million songs
and an exabyte is around a thousand
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 an IT the
Python eating a big problem so you
imagine a Python you can visualize it
eating a pig you've got 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 okay and so for
some of our customers it would have
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 5000 DVDs and the larger
snowballs we have is between 11 and 14
thousand DVDs depending upon 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 can easily put the wrong label
put them in the wrong box that doesn't
happen it's all automated but 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 vast 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 aired
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 were 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 incites jello if
you were standing there and would kill
you and temperature-wise
it's designed for the most extreme
environments they can operate it you
know really high temperatures like 140
degrees ambient temperature and really
cold temperatures like minus 20 and 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
a USGS used the snowballs they had local
servers and the 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 they're
downloaded the data and ship 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
cyber security 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
snow family for studio shoots they're
shooting an 8 and 12 K cameras now and
so that's a lot of data and so they put
it on the snow balls and you can see the
screens on the front there are used for
quality control when they're done with
the shoot they actually ship the snow
ball back and it up
dating in the cloud and then they
post-process it there's another I would
call it the upper cell version which is
the snowball edge and that's a hundred
terabytes 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 one 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 as the equivalent
of twelve hundred and fifty snowballs in
it and so it's what we call a hundred
petabyte truck put in context how much
data a snowmobile can take let's say
this typical notebook is 500 gigabytes a
hundred 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 fibre that will connect to your
data center fill her 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 if you
basically assign a 10 gigabit per second
line to it which is pretty reasonable it
would take you about 20
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 is 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 0g
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 to validate
it and then once the data is all
unloaded and you validate it it's
unloaded isn't then the snowballs set up
for another run for another customer
just as Amazon is disrupted retail with
its e-commerce business thus no 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 learnings
offering to two years ago we deployed
fourteen hundred and forty new products
and services we deployed 1954 that's in
2018 I'm sure we will beat that in 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 Agency
vo d-type Laos top secret compartment at
a level of certification and and we
continue to have just a wide variety we
have the most number of databases
available to our customers and most
variety of databases the 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
[Music]