Amazon brings a bigger Snowball to Australia
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced the local availability of Snowball in Australia in efforts to help customers move their on-premises data into the cloud.
The introduction of Snowball to Australia will include the newly announced 80 terabyte version of the appliance and the 40 terabyte Snowball, which was announced during re:Invent last year.
Snowball was the company's first leap into the hardware market. It offers import/export service to its customers, so it means not only can it help customers migrate their data off more easily from their existing infrastructure, but it can also help move data on AWS back to on-premises.
The company said there are further plans to increase global awareness and delivery of Snowball by committing to making the appliance available for all AWS regions by the end of 2016.
"Moving data into the cloud is something a lot of people have started to think about," said Stephen Schmidt, AWS VP and chief information security officer, at the opening keynote of AWS Summit Sydney on Wednesday.
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He said a lot of customers are doing this by either choosing to move small to medium amounts of data frequently or large amounts of data infrequently.
In addition, the company plans to deliver Kinesis Analytics, which will allow developers to use familiar queries and SQL to run time series-based analysis on real-time data. Due for release at the end of the year, the solution will rely on over 100 pre-built queries that will be able to run analysis including trends, moving averages, and filter events.
The release of Kinesis Analytics will be in addition to the existing suite of Kinesis products: Kinesis Stream, which was the first product the company introduced as part of its first move into big data processing; and Kinesis Firehouse, a service for loading streaming data from a web or mobile app through an API call to AWS.
AWS has also launched S3 Transfer Acceleration to persuade more customers to move data into the cloud, claiming it can provide 300 percent faster uploads. As a vote of confidence, Schmidt said if customers who use S3 Transfer Acceleration do not see a difference from their standard upload, they will not have to pay for the service.
AWS plans to bring AWS Lambda and its API gateway to Sydney in the next few months.
In March, Microsoft released Azure Functions, a "serverless compute" service, to compete directly against AWS Lambda.