Snowball

Snowball Simplified:

Snowball is a giant physical disk that is used for migrating high quantities of data into AWS. It is a peta-byte scale data transport solution. Using a large disk like Snowball helps to circumvent common large scale data transfer problems such as high network costs, long transfer times, and security concerns. Snowballs are extremely secure by design and once the data transfer is complete, the snowballs are wiped clean of your data.

Snowball Key Details:

  • Snowball is a strong choice for a data transfer job if you need a secure and quick data transfer ranging in the terabytes to many petabytes into AWS.
  • Snowball can also be the right choice if you don’t want to make expensive upgrades to your existing network infrastructure, if you frequently experience large backlogs of data, if you’re located in a physically isolated environment, or if you’re in an area where high-speed internet connections are not available or cost-prohibitive.
  • As a rule of thumb, if it takes more than one week to upload your data to AWS using the spare capacity of your existing internet connection, then you should consider using Snowball.
  • For example, if you have a 100 Mb connection that you can solely dedicate to transferring your data and you need to transfer 100 TB of data in total, it will take more than 100 days for the transfer to complete over that connection. You can make the same transfer in about a week by using multiple Snowballs.
  • Here is a reference for when Snowball should be considered based on the number of days it would take to make the same transfer over an internet connection:

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Snowball Edge and Snowmobile:

  • Snowball Edge is a specific type of Snowball that comes with both compute and storage capabilities via AWS Lambda and specific EC2 instance types. This means you can run code within your snowball while your data is en route to an Amazon data center. This enables support of local workloads in remote or offline locations and as a result, Snowball Edge does not need to be limited to a data transfer service. An interesting use case is with airliners. Planes sometimes fly with snowball edges onboard so they can store large amounts of flight data and compute necessary functions for the plane’s own systems. Snowball Edges can also be clustered locally for even better performance.
  • Snowmobile is an exabyte-scale data transfer solution. It is a data transport solution for 100 petabytes of data and is contained within a 45-foot shipping container hauled by a semi-truck. This massive transfer makes sense if you want to move your entire data center with years of data into the cloud.