AWS Snowball edge devices.

 

AWS Snowball Edge devices are part of the AWS Snow Family — a set of physical devices used to move large amounts of data into and out of AWS when online transfer isn’t practical due to bandwidth constraints, high costs, or time constraints.

The concept:  AWS Snowball Edge.

Snowball Edge is a ruggedized, portable edge computing and data transfer device with onboard storage and compute capabilities. It is used primarily for:

1. Data migration (terabytes to petabytes of data)
2. Edge computing (run EC2, Lambda, etc., at remote locations)
3. Disconnected operations (locations without stable internet)

Architecture:

Snowball Edge Device Types

There are two main types:

1. Snowball Edge Storage Optimized

• Purpose: Large-scale data migration, local storage.
• Capacity: 80 TB usable storage (encrypted)
• Compute: Some compute (optional EC2 instances for basic processing)

2. Snowball Edge Compute Optimized

• Purpose: Edge computing in disconnected environments (military, ships, field ops)
• Capacity: 42 TB usable storage
• Compute: Up to 52 vCPUs, GPU support (NVIDIA Tesla V100)

 Key Features

Feature	Description
Secure	Data is encrypted with 256-bit encryption and managed with AWS Key Management Service (KMS).
Tamper-Resistant	Includes a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) and tamper-evident seals.
Local Processing	Supports EC2 instances and Lambda functions on the device.
Data Transfer	Automatically transfers data to Amazon S3 once returned to AWS.
Snowball Edge Client	CLI-based tool used to manage and transfer data to/from the device.

 Common Use Cases

• Data center shutdown/migration
• IoT data collection in the field
• Disaster recovery operations
• Media and entertainment (video transfer)
• Military and industrial applications

 Workflow Summary

1. Create a Snowball job in AWS Console.
2. AWS ships the device to you.
3. Use the Snowball Edge client or NFS interface to transfer data.
4. Ship the device back to AWS.
5. Data is uploaded to your S3 bucket.
6. Device is sanitized.

 Related Snow Family Devices

Device	Purpose
AWS Snowcone	Lightweight (8 TB), portable for small-scale jobs.
AWS Snowmobile	100 PB data migration in a shipping container.