AWS Snowball is a hardware appliance designed to move massive amounts of data between your site and the AWS cloud in a short time. Some common use cases for Snowball include the following:
The idea behind Snowball is that it’s quicker to physically ship a large amount of data than it is to transfer it over a network. For instance, suppose you want to migrate a 40 TB database to AWS. Such a transfer even over a blazing-fast 1 Gbps connection would still take more than 4 days!
But instead, for a nominal fee, AWS will send you a Snowball device. You simply transfer your fi les to it and ship it back. When AWS receives it, AWS transfers the fi les from Snowball to one or more S3 buckets. You’re not charged any transfer fees for importing fi les into S3, and once there, they’re immediately available for use by other AWS services.
The largest 80 TB Snowball device costs $250 to use and can store up to 72 TB. If you don’t need to transfer that much, you can opt for the slightly smaller 50 TB Snowball, which costs $200 and stores up to 42 TB. Snowball’s RJ45 and SFP+ network interfaces support speeds up to 10 Gbps, making it possible to transfer 72 TB of data to the device in about 2.5 days! (Although a 10 Gbps connection can transfer this amount of data in less than a day, the write speeds of the solid-state drives [SSDs] in Snowball limit the effective transfer rate to around 3 Gbps.)
Once you receive your Snowball, you can keep it for 10 days without incurring any additional costs. If you hold onto it longer than that, you’ll be charged an extra $15 per day. You’re allowed to keep Snowball for up to 90 days, which is more than enough time to fill it up.
You can use Snowball to export data from S3, but you’ll be charged outbound S3 transfer rates, which range from $0.03 to $0.05 per gigabyte, depending on the region.
Snowball is contained in a rugged, tamper-resistant enclosure. It includes a trusted platform module (TPM) chip that detects unauthorized modifi cations to the hardware, software, or fi rmware. After each use, AWS verifi es that the TPM did not detect any tampering. If any tampering is detected by the TPM chip or if the device appears damaged, AWS does not transfer any data from it.
Snowball uses two layers of encryption. First, when you transfer data to or from Snowball, the data is encrypted in transit using SSL. Second, the data you put on a Snowball is always encrypted at rest. Snowball enforces data encryption by requiring you to transfer data to it using only either the Snowball Client or the more advanced S3 SDK Adapter for Snowball. The former doesn’t require any coding knowledge. Both run on Linux, macOS, and Windows operating systems.
Data is encrypted using AES 256-bit encryption that’s enforced by the Snowball Client or S3 SDK Adapter for Snowball, ensuring that the device never stores your data unencrypted. As an added security measure, AWS erases your data from Snowball before sending it to another customer, following the media sanitization standards published by the National Institutes for Standards and Technology (NIST) in Special Publication 800-88.
Snowball Edge is like Snowball but offers a wider variety of features. Snowball Edge offers the same network connectivity options as Snowball but adds a QSFP+ port, allowing you to achieve faster network speeds than Snowball. Also, Snowball is designed to transfer large amounts of data only between your local environment and S3. Snowball Edge offers the same functionality plus the following:
There are three different device options to choose from, each optimized for a different application:
Storage Optimized This option provides up to 80 TB of usable storage, 24 vCPUs, and 32 GB of memory for compute applications. The QSFP+ network interface supports up to 40 Gbps.
Compute Optimized This offers the most compute power, giving you 52 vCPUs and 208 GB of memory. It has 39.5 TB of usable storage, plus 7.68 TB dedicated to compute instances.
Compute Optimized with GPU This is identical to the Compute Optimized option, except it includes an NVIDIA V100 Tensor Core graphical processing unit (GPU), making it ideal for machine learning and high-performance computing applications. Both Compute Optimized device options feature a QSFP+ network interface capable of speeds up to 100 Gbps.
You can cluster 5 to 10 Snowball Edge devices together to build a local, highly available compute or storage cluster. This is useful if you have a large amount of data that you need to process locally.
Snowball Edge doesn’t support virtual private clouds (VPCs). You can’t place an EC2 instance running on Snowball Edge in a VPC. Instead, you assign the instance an IP addresses on your local network.
Table 8.2 highlights some key similarities and differences between Snowball and Snowball Edge.
Comparison of Snowball and Snowball Edge
| Feature | Snowball | Snowball Edge |
|---|---|---|
| Transfer data to and from S3 | Yes | Yes |
| Local EC2 instances | No | Yes |
| Local compute with Lambda | No | Yes |
| File server functionality using NFS | No | Yes |
| Local S3 buckets | No | Yes |