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AWS lesson

AWS S3 Snow Family

The AWS Snow Family is a set of physical devices and services designed to help you move large amounts of data into and out of AWS, especially Amazon S3, when network transfer is slow, unreliable, or impractical. The Snow Family includes AWS Snowcone, AWS Snowball, and AWS Snowmobile, each suited for different data volumes and use cases.​

Main Members of the Snow Family

  1. AWS Snowcone:
    The smallest, most portable device (8 TB usable storage). Ideal for edge computing, remote locations, or small data transfers.

  2. AWS Snowball:
    Rugged devices available in two types:

  3. AWS Snowmobile:
    A 45-foot shipping container that can move up to 100 PB of data. Used for extremely large data migrations, such as entire data centers.

    • Snowball Edge Storage Optimized (up to 80 TB usable storage)
    • Snowball Edge Compute Optimized (for local processing and storage)
      Used for large-scale data migrations, edge processing, and disaster recovery.


Example Scenario

Suppose your company has 50 TB of video archives stored on-premises. Uploading this data to Amazon S3 over the internet would take weeks due to limited bandwidth. Instead, you use AWS Snowball Edge Storage Optimized.


How the process works:

  1. Order a Snowball device from the AWS Management Console, specifying your S3 bucket as the destination.
  2. Receive the device at your location.
  3. Connect the device to your local network and use the AWS Snowball client to transfer your video files onto the device.
  4. Ship the device back to AWS using the provided shipping label.
  5. AWS uploads the data from the device directly into your specified S3 bucket.


Example: Using AWS Snowball for S3 Data Transfer

  • You have a bucket named media-archive in S3.
  • You order a Snowball Edge device and specify media-archive as the target.
  • After copying your 50 TB of video files to the device, you return it to AWS.
  • AWS securely uploads your files to the media-archive bucket.
  • You receive a notification when the transfer is complete.


Benefits

  • Speed: Transfer large datasets much faster than over the internet.
  • Security: Data is encrypted end-to-end; only you have the encryption keys.
  • Scalability: Suitable for data migrations from a few terabytes to hundreds of petabytes.
  • Edge Processing: Snowball and Snowcone can run compute workloads at the edge before transferring data to S3.