Is Amazon’s cloud service too big to fail?
August 2, 2017
Grazed from FnLondon. Author: Yolanda Bobeldijk.
Gavin Jackson, head of Europe, the Middle East and Africa at Amazon Web Services, loves to talk about snowballs. Not the lumps of mush and ice that children chuck at each other, but Amazon’s portable information storage devices, big grey suitcases that hold huge amounts of data.
When clients such as banks sign on with Amazon Web Services, the ecommerce juggernaut’s cloud-computing service, they upload encrypted data from their old legacy IT systems into the snowball, or the larger-capacity snowball edge. These are then shipped to an Amazon data centre where the data is transferred into the AWS cloud…
With AWS’ customer base growing almost exponentially, however, a 50-terabyte snowball was no longer cutting it. “Even that wasn’t [big] enough for some customers,” Jackson explained in an interview at AWS’ office in Aldgate. Responding to the demand, Amazon created much, much larger storage devices and mounted them on tractor-trailers. Naturally, they call them snowmobiles…
Read more from the source @ https://www.fnlondon.com/articles/is-amazons-cloud-service-too-big-to-fail-20170801