AWS Amazon’s cloud computing division introduced its new tools last Wednesday bow and arrow Designed for military operations, to work in extreme conditions: they provide application and information backup Without internet connectivity and in extreme conditions.
The novelty was introduced by Max Peterson, the company’s vice president of public sectors, in a keynote address at the AWS Summit this week in Washington: “This is a new offering from the AWS Snow family of devices that provide computing services, storage, and Other Hybrid AWS Services remote or in disallowed, interrupted, intermittent or confined environments“, Said.
“Snowblade Complies robustness parameters Enables US military, defense customers to drive their operations and manage demanding workloads in edge locations that may be subject to extreme operating conditions.
The military sector dictates certain conditions for equipment to operate that must withstand vibrations, falls, and temperatures that conventional equipment cannot withstand, among other constraints.
As mentioned, since AWS didn’t provide more details, the Snowblade weighs around 36kg (with two handles for carrying it between two people).
Also they are protected 256-bit and 2-layer encryption In transports that are not stored in the device: it is in case it falls into the hands of the enemy, becoming a useless block from which information cannot be obtained (“bricks,
“With support for 208 vCPUs in a portable, compact 5U, half-rack width form factor, the AWS Snowblade is the densest compute appliance in the AWS Snow family,” he explained.
Practical use cases
This type of device (Snowball, previous model) was used, for example, to secure and migrate data out of Ukraine after the Russian invasion: “Our Snowballs, which are data transport devices, are designed for extreme situations. There are also state-of-the-art computing devices,” explained Clarin Liam Maxwell, director of government transformation at Amazon Web Services and leader of that migration.
“They let you run services even when you’re offline, but they’re the size of a portfolio. Ukrainians load data into these snowballs and drive them to the airport in vans to take that information to the cloud outside the country.” Can.”
There is still very little information about this new version, especially since it is military equipment, AWS doesn’t provide details beyond the basic specifications.
Its previous model, the Snowball, was allowed to store up to 10TB And you can attach multiple volumes to any instance. You can use up to 86 TB of HDD storage for sbg1 on Snowball Edge Storage Optimized and up to 40 TB of HDD storage for sbg1 on Snowball Edge Compute Optimized.
Only security forces can purchase these products. This is part of a program called Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability (JWCC), a $9 billion market they are a part of. AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google and Oracle.
AWS Summit, Cloud Summit in the public domain
AWS is one of the largest cloud service providers in the world, along with other players such as Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Oracle. This is a dominant type of technology in today’s world and, above all, for states.
“The term ‘cloud computing’ refers to the on-demand delivery of computing resources over the Internet at pay-per-use prices. Rather than purchasing, owning and maintaining their own data centers and servers, organizations can purchase storage, computing databases and other services based on their needs and when they are in peak demand”, explains Andres Tahata, general director of the public sector for Latin America at AWS.
Last week, the AWS Summit was held in Washington, which has been held for 13 years and brings together experts from the cloud computing industry. It has more than 300 sessions between workshops, conferences as well as meetings with questions and answers between experts, attendees and journalists. It is intended for businesses, governments, and organizations that rely on the services provided by AWS.
AWS was founded in 2006 and currently, it is the second most prolific business of the company founded by Jeff Bezos after Amazon.com marketplace: last year it had a turnover of $80 billion.
