AWS SnowBall

AWS Snowball is a service offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that helps customers transfer large amounts of data to and from the AWS cloud. It is designed to address the challenge of moving terabytes or petabytes of data securely, quickly, and cost-effectively.

The Snowball service utilizes a physical device called the AWS Snowball appliance. The appliance is a ruggedized storage device available in two versions: the original Snowball and the more advanced Snowball Edge. Both versions are secure, tamper-resistant, and equipped with multiple layers of encryption to ensure data protection.

Here's a brief overview of each Snowball device:

1. AWS Snowball: The original Snowball is a portable, 50TB storage device that you can request from AWS. It is used for data migration projects where the data needs to be transported from an on-premises location to AWS. You connect the Snowball appliance to your network, transfer your data onto it, and then ship it back to AWS for secure data transfer to the desired AWS region. Snowball supports integrations with various data sources, including NFS, SMB, and S3.

2. AWS Snowball Edge: The Snowball Edge device combines storage and computing capabilities, making it suitable for edge computing and data processing scenarios. It comes in two variations: Storage Optimized and Compute Optimized. The Storage Optimized Snowball Edge provides up to 80TB of storage capacity, while the Compute Optimized version offers 42TB of storage along with an EC2 compute instance for running custom applications at the edge. Snowball Edge devices can be used for local storage, data pre-processing, data analysis, and running AWS Lambda functions locally.

Both Snowball and Snowball Edge devices are designed to be rugged and portable, allowing them to be easily transported to different locations. They have built-in security features such as tamper-proof enclosures and encryption keys, ensuring data integrity during transit.

Using AWS Snowball, customers can overcome bandwidth limitations, network costs, and long transfer times associated with moving large volumes of data over the internet. It provides a scalable and efficient method for data migration, backup, disaster recovery, and other data-intensive use cases.