AWS Snow Family is a set of physical devices designed to help customer migrate data into and out of the AWS cloud securely and efficiently and provides edge computing capability. In the scenario of transferring large amount of data over the internet which may not seem to be practical or feasible, and you are based at an edge location where access to internet is not available, the Snow Family should be used. The Snow Family includes several devices tailored to different use cases:
- Data migration
- Snowcone
- Snowball Edge
- Snowmobile
- Edge computing
- Snowcone
- Snowball Edge
What the Snow Family trying to resolve
When transferring massive data to the cloud via internet, you may experience several challenges:
- Limited connectivity
- Limited bandwidth
- High network cost
- Shared bandwidth (can’t maximise the line)
- Connection stability
- Unaffordable time to transfer data
AWS Snow Family are offline devices to perform data migration, if the data migration takes more than a week to transfer over the network, or uploading data to the cloud over the network is not practical, you should consider use the Snow Family.
How does Snow Family work
In traditional data migration to the cloud, you upload data to the cloud over the internet; with the AWS Snow Family, you obtain and load on-premise data into a physical Snow Family device which will be posted to you, and then you ship the device back to AWS after it loaded with your data, upon receiving, AWS imports data from the device to the AWS cloud.
AWS OpsHub
Historically, to manage a Snow Family device you need to use a Command Line Interface tool, today you can use AWS OpsHub which is a software that can be installed in your computer that provides a GUI to manage Snow Family device. With AWS OpsHub, you can:
- Unlock and configure single or clustered devices
- Transfer files
- Launch or manage EC2 instances running on Snow Family device
- Monitor device matrices (storage capacity, active instances on your device)
- Launch compatible AWS services on your Snow Family device (e.g. AWS DataSync, Network File System, EC2 instance)
Snowball Edge (for data transfers)
Snowball edge is a portable computing device for data transfer and edge computing applications. Use cases includes large data cloud migration, DC decommission, and disaster recovery. Snowball edge provide block storage and Amazon S3 compatible object storage, you pay for per-data transfer job.
- Snowball Edge Storage Optimized Snowball Edge Storage Optimized offers 80 TB of HDD capacity for block volume and Amazon S3 compatible object storage.
- Snowball Edge Compute Optimized Snowball Edge Compute Optimized offers 42 TB of HDD capacity or 28 TB NVMe capacity for block volume and S3 compatible object storage.
Snowball Edge pricing
You pay for device usage and data transfer out of AWS, data transfer into Amazon S3 is free of charge.
- On-demand pricing
- One-time service fee per job
- 10 days of usage for Snowball Edge Storage Optimized 80 TB.
- 15 days of usage for Snowball Edge Storage Optimized 210 TB.
- Shipping days are not counted
- Pay per day for any additional days
- One-time service fee per job
- Committed upfront pricing
- Pay in advance for monthly, 1 year and 3 years of usage
- Up to 62% discount pricing
Snowcone & Snowcone SSD
Snowcone is a small, lightweight, and portable device for data transfer and edge computing. It is designed to withstand harsh environments. You must provide your own battery and cables. Snowcone supports both offline data transfer and data transfer via internet using DataSync. Use Snowcone where Snowball Edge does not fit (space-constrained environment).
- Snowcone 8 TB of HDD storage
- Snowcone SSD 14 TB of SSD storage
Snowmobile
Snowmobile a truck vehicle with payload, it is used to transfer massive amount of data to and from the AWS. It can transfer exabytes of data (1 EB = 1,000 PB = 1,000,000 TB). Each Snowmobile has 100 PB of capacity, you can order multiple Snowmobiles to transfer exabytes of data. Use Snowmobile over Snowball Edge when you have more than 10 PB of data.
Back to parent node: Cloud Computing
Cloud_computingAWSAWS_CLF-C02AWS_storageAWS_Snow_FamilySnowconeSnowmobileSnowball_EdgeOpsHub
Reference* - Udemy Ultimate AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner CLF-C02