Snow Family

Solution Architect Associate

  • A set of secure appliances that provie petabyte-scale data collection and processing solution at the edge and migrate large-scale data into and out of AWS
  • Used to be called Import/Export, where you could send in your own storage devices to AWS. This got too expensive to support by AWS as the types of devices being sent got crazy
  • Physical devices that provide large scale data transportation. Streamlines bringing data into AWS by bypassing the internet in a common way via an appliance
  • Supports importing to S3, or exporting from S3
  • You load data into the appliance, send into AWS, they upload that data to your storage device using the high speed internal network
  • Tamper resistent enclosures
  • 256 bit encryption
  • Once the data transfer has been performed, AWS performs a software erasure of the data on the appliance
  • Various types of Snow Devices
    • Snowcone
      • Smallest device in the snow family
      • Provides 8TB of storage, 4GB of memory and 2 vCPUs
      • Designed to move small data loads into AWS
      • Has direct IoT sensor integration
      • Great where power and space are constrained
    • Snowball Edge
      • Supports 48-81 TB of data
      • Also has compute capabilities built in.
      • Supports varying amounts of CPU and RAM
      • Think of this as a small AWS data center in a box you can bring into your data center.
      • You can use Lambda on these
    • Snowmobile
      • Basically a giant sea container on a truck that can support 100 petabyte level data
      • You can use about 10 of these to pull in 1 exobyte of data into AWS in around 6 months