AWS Snowball Edge now supports offline software updates for Snowball Edge devices in air-gapped environments

Posted on: Oct 8, 2019

AWS Snowball Edge now allows you to perform an offline update to the software of your Snowball Edge device when your device is not connected to the internet.

Previously, updating your Snowball Edge’s software required that the device be connected to the internet or be sent back to AWS. Now, you can keep your Snowball Edge software up to date even if your device(s) cannot connect to the internet, or are required to run in an air-gapped environment. To complete offline updates, download the software update from a client machine with connection to the internet using the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI). Then, have the Snowball Edge device download and install the software update using the Snowball Edge device API. For more information about offline updates, visit the Snowball Edge documentation page.  

Snowball Edge helps overcome the challenges of moving large data sets to the cloud when you do not have adequate network bandwidth for transfers. Snowball Edge also enables you to run Amazon EC2 instances for edge computing in remote, disconnected, and harsh environments. You can develop and test applications in AWS and then deploy them on Snowball Edge devices to collect and pre-process data for image analysis or machine learning. You can then ship the data back to AWS for storage and further processing. 

Offline updates for Snowball Edge devices is a free feature and is available in AWS regions worldwide. To learn more, access the following resources:

AWS Snowball Edge product page
AWS Snowball Edge documentation
Blog: Data migration best practices with AWS Snowball Edge
AWS Console