AWS Teases Mysterious Mil-Spec 'Snowblade' Server

Amazon Web Services has announced a new member of its "Snow" family of on-prem hardware -- but the specs of the machine appear not to be available to eyes outside the US military. From a report: AWS announced the "Snowblade" on Tuesday, revealing it's a "portable, compact 5U, half-rack width form-factor" that can offer up to 209 vCPUs running "AWS compute, storage, and other hybrid services in remote locations, including Denied, Disrupted, Intermittent, and Limited (DDIL) environments."

The boxes can run Amazon EC2, AWS IAM, AWS CloudTrail, AWS IoT Greengrass, AWS Deep Learning AMIs, Amazon Sagemaker Neo, and AWS DataSync. The device meets the US military's MIL-STD-810H Ruggedization Standards, meaning it can handle extreme temperatures, vibrations, and shocks. The cloud colossus's brief description also lauds the Snowblade as "the densest compute device of the AWS Snow Family allowing Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) customers to run demanding workloads in space, weight, and power (SWaP) constrained edge locations." The AWS announcement links to more information on its Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) -- and there be dragons. Your correspondent's civilian-grade AWS account was unable to access JWCC resources.

Re:

[Szeraax]

You can't talk about API requests yet. Have to wait until the June 12th blackout is over first. :P

Re:

[Fart Breath]

LOL.

Can you do me a favor and try to register the name that I'm using? I want to see whether we can both be posting from user "Fart Breath" at the same time. I don't wanna log out though..

Sure, we can tell you the specs

[93 Escort Wagon]

But then we have to kill you.

The computer equivalent of...

[AmazingRuss]

... a $1400 hammer

Re:

[iisan7]

For those curious, the hammer was only $435, practically a bargain! /s.

When you actually look into it, this is not the price paid for a hammer, but a result of the way the Pentagon accounting worked. They weren't itemizing their accounting but dividing the total cost of a package of equipment equally across each item in the kit, including the gear plus the labor and R&D. As if you bought a kit with a screwdriver and one screw for $4, and then said that the driver and the screw each cost $2. Now you

BYOF?

[anonymouscoward52236]

Is it BYOF (Bring Your Own Fiber), or does AWS contract people to run fiber to where ever you are? LOL. Or maybe they have a 5G cellular modem in the box? Or maybe both, since it's meant to be reliable?

Open is now a marketing term

[Required Snark]

So Google has a secret "open" design. OpenAI is proprietary.

Open now only applies to doors and/or windows (not Microsoft). It has no meaning with respect to technology.

distributed in the field

[ZipNada]

One thing the US military has learned from the Ukraine conflict is that you want to have lots of redundancy so that when the drones take out the odd command bunker here and there it doesn't cripple you. These compute centers will probably be truck-mounted and deployed in many places, communicating by satellite. Some day they'll run your drone army for you. Humans will be in the rear, and move up to hold ground when its safe.

Re:

[timeOday]

One thing the US military has learned from the Ukraine conflict is that you want to have lots of redundancy so that when the drones take out the odd command bunker here and there it doesn't cripple you.

Great idea, we can call it a "cloud"

Re:

[raftpeople]

These portable computing devices are being called a "personal" cloud, or PC.

snowblade?

[farmout]

obviously intended for nuclear winter :-(

Such a missed opportunity

[Martin Blank]

They could have called it Denied, Intermittent, Limited, and Disrupted Operations environments.

Mi-Spec?

[bn-7bc]

This might be sightly ot, but why would Mil-Spec be of interest to anyone outside the military, I would imagine their requirements are rather specialized. I'm no expert on the subject but how would Mil-Spec be relevant to anything in a dc that is probably far away from an active battlefield, unless ofc the Mil-Speck includes things like surviving flooding wile in operation or not meting when the ac fails.

Re:

[necro81]

This might be sightly ot, but why would Mil-Spec be of interest to anyone outside the military, I would imagine their requirements are rather specialized.

Not to worry: you're not one of the potential customers. From the press release [amazon.com]:

AWS Snowblade is available in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region. AWS Snowblade is limited to U.S. Department of Defense customers under the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) contract.

More generally, Mil-Spec components - computers or anything else, really - is a ki

Poor Linking

[necro81]

The summary only links to a pithy article from The Register. Hey editors: how about linking to the actual Amazon press release [amazon.com]?

Not that the press release has much more info, either. It's a product aimed squarely at DoD personnel and vendors, not ordinary customers. Not even a pic. Still, it is generally good practice to link directly to the source, and skip the breathless commentary.