Amazon Web Services is abandoning its fleet of snowmobile data dump trucks, the trucks packed with petabytes of spinning disks designed to get big businesses into the cloud.

Introduced in 2016, Snowmobile offered a way to transfer very large amounts of data to the public cloud, recognizing that moving exabytes across a wider network is difficult.

AWS proposed driving a snowmobile, a 45-foot-long climate-controlled shipping container filled with 100 petabytes of hard disk storage, to customers' data centers, migrating data to that container using a 1Tb/s link, and then physically transporting it to the nearest AWS region. Once the snowmobile is parked, the data it was hauling in would be imported into the Amazon cloud.

This was hoped to be more efficient or practical than transmitting it electronically.