Category: AWS Snow Family

Learn how AWS Snowcone and Amazon S3 can help Government of Canada (GC) organizations securely transfer and store their data, and how two GC organizations have already used these services to migrate data securely. Find out how these AWS services address data security, privacy, and compliance with regulatory requirements specific to GC customers.

Moving sensitive US government data to the cloud requires the meticulous application of a proven migration methodology, skilled resources, a robust solution, and a mature logistics model. A US government agency elected to move its Security and Information Event Management (SIEM) system from a virtualized, on-premise environment to the AWS Cloud. AWS Partner Booz Allen performed the migration and used the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) and AWS Snow Family of devices as mechanisms to help the customer save time, reduce costs, and increase their agility to develop new features for their constituents.

Since 1971, Canada Centre for Mapping and Earth Observation (CCMEO) at Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) has accumulated an Earth observation (EO) data archive in excess of two petabytes (PB). NRCan wanted to modernize its geospatial offerings at a faster pace, so they turned to the AWS Snow Family on AWS to migrate their large volume of data.

In the immediate aftermath of a natural disaster, cell towers, power lines, and telephone and internet cable are often damaged or destroyed, limiting the ability for responders to share data and access the internet. The AWS Disaster Response team conducted a field testing operation designed to replicate a common disaster response scenario, to show how to establish an ad-hoc network at field sites with limited connectivity and create a link to an office headquarters to provide access to cloud-based resources and data to responders in the field.

To help support DIL environments, Amazon Web Services (AWS) created the Snow family of products to include the AWS Snowcone and AWS Snowball devices. The Snow family moves data processing and analysis as close as necessary to where data is created in order to deliver intelligent, real-time responsiveness and streamline the amount of data transferred. To address the challenges of edge of the edge computing, we use the Snowball Edge as a central management hub and a Snowcone as an outer edge device. This how-to shows how to use Rancher as a centralized Kubernetes management tool installed on a Snowball, which has been set up to manage a single-node Kubernetes cluster on a Snowcone. This configuration allows us to fully manage the containers running on one or more Snowcones from the Snowball itself.