AWS Snow Family

AWS Snow Family provides a range of physical devices designed for large-scale data transfer between on-premises environments and AWS when internet-based transfers or Direct Connect are impractical.

  1. SnowCone: Up to 8 TB, for small-scale edge data transfer.
  2. Snowball: 10 TB to 80 TB, for storage and data migration.
  3. Snowball Edge: Handle both storage and compute workloads.
    1. Storage Optimized 40 vCPUs and up to 80 TB.
    2. Compute Optimized offer 52 vCPUs and up to 80 TB.
  4. Snowmobile: Over 10 PB. Ideal for ultra-large data transfers, typically used for data center migrations to AWS.

Security: All Snow devices use 256-bit encryption for data protection.

Key Notes for Certification

  1. Snow Family devices are a temporary solution. They are intended for bulk data transfer. Once the data is transferred to AWS, we generally wouldn’t keep using the physical devices for ongoing operations.
  2. Data Migration Workflow:
    • When using Snowball, data is loaded onto the device and then physically shipped to AWS for upload into services like S3 or Redshift.
    • For Snowmobile, data is transferred in bulk by truck, offering high-speed transport for extremely large datasets.
  3. Service Availability: We need understand where Snow Family services are available and their geographical limitations. For example, Snowmobile may only be available in specific large regions, while Snowcone and Snowball are available in most AWS regions.

Snowball Edge Cost Structure

  1. The base price covers the device and 10 days of usage at the on-premises location.
  2. If returned within a week, the company pays the base price plus any data transfer charges for data moved out of AWS.

Question

A company that processes satellite images has an application that runs on AWS. The company stores the images in an Amazon S3 bucket. For compliance reasons, the company must replicate all data once a month to an on-premises location. The average amount of data that the company needs to transfer is 60 TB. What is the MOST cost-effective way(cheapest) to transfer this data?

  1. Export the data monthly from the existing S3 bucket to an AWS Snowball Edge Storage Optimized device. Ship the device to the on-premises location. Transfer the data. Return the device a week later.(Correct)
  2. Use S3 bucket replication to copy all objects to a new S3 bucket that uses S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA) storage. Use an AWS Storage Gateway File Gateway to transfer the data from the new S3 bucket to the on-premises location. Delete the images from the new S3 bucket after the transfer of the data.
  3. Use S3 bucket replication to copy all objects to a new S3 bucket that uses S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA) storage. Use Amazon S3 to transfer the data from the new S3 bucket to the on-premises location. Delete the images from the new S3 bucket after the transfer of the data.
  4. Create an Amazon CloudFront Distribution for the objects in the existing S3 bucket. Download the objects from CloudFront to the on-premises location every month.