AWS: Storage: Snowball

Snowball service uses physical storage devices to transfer data between S3 and your onsite data storage devices at faster-than-internet speed. Snowball provides powerful interfaces to create jobs, track data & track status of your jobs.

Snowball devices are physically rugged devices that are protected by AWS KMS. They secure & protect your data in transit.

Conceptually Snowball & Snowball Edge are same.

Snowball is intended for large amounts of data i.e. more than 10 TB else this is not economical choice. Below are a few key features

• Available in 80 TB (only US) & 50 TB in most of the AWS regions

• Enforced encryption protects data at rest and in physical transit

• You can manage your jobs through Snowball management console

Use case	Snowball	Snowball Edge
Import data into Amazon S3	✓	✓
Export from Amazon S3	✓	✓
Durable local storage		✓
Local compute with AWS Lambda		✓
Amazon EC2 compute instances		✓
Use in a cluster of devices		✓
Use with AWS IoT Greengrass (IoT)		✓
Transfer files through NFS with a GUI		✓