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. Read more of this story at Slashdot.