AWS Snowball and Snowmobile Overview

Snowball is a transport solution in AWS for petabyte-scale data.

Snowball uses secure appliances that will be delivered and later collected back, to transfer large amounts of data into and out of the AWS cloud.

Transferring data with Snowball is secure, and costs much less compared to high-speed Internet.

Snowball uses multiple layers of security designed to protect your data including tamper-resistant enclosures, 256-bit encryption, and an industry-standard Trusted Platform Module (TPM) designed to ensure both security and full chain-of-custody of your data.

Snowball transport process

1. Snowball transport process is simple: create a job in console and a Snowball appliance will be shipped to you.

2. You can attach the appliance to your local network and use the snowball client (which can be downloaded) to transfer data to the appliance.

3. The client will encrypt and transfer the files to the appliance at high speed.

4. Once the transfer is complete and the appliance is ready to be returned, the E Ink shipping label will automatically update and you can track the job status via Amazon SNS, text messages, or directly in the Console.

5. Once the data transfer job has been processed and verified, AWS performs a software erasure of the Snowball appliance.

Types of Snowball

1. Snowball

   1. This is the standard data transport appliance with 80TB capacity.

2. Snowball Edge

   1. 100TB devices with onboard storage and compute capabilities.

   2. Apart from data transfer, snowball edge also can act as a temporary storage tier for large local databases and support local workloads in remote and offline locations.

   3. Connects to your existing infrastructure using standard storage interfaces.

   4. Snowball edge can cluster together while acting as a local storage tier, to process your data on-premises, and run even when they are not connected to the cloud.

   5. Can be considered as a small AWS data center available on-premise.

3. Snowmobile

   1. 45 foot long shipping container pulled by a semi-trailer truck.

   2. Exabyte scale data transfer.

   3. 100PB capacity per snowmobile.

   4. Can even used for a complete data center migration.

Snowball Alternatives

Before snowball people used to use the Import Export Disk that accelerates transferring data into and out of AWS using physical storage appliances, bypassing the Internet. People can send external hard disks and Amazon will upload data directly.

However, when people started sending different types of disks it became difficult to manage, which eventually led to development of snowball.