Effective November 12, 2024, AWS will discontinue previous generation AWS Snowball devices and both Snowcone devices (HDD and SDD). We will continue to support existing customers using these end-of-life devices until November 12, 2025. The latest generation AWS Snowball devices are available for all customers. For more information on the specific devices and alternatives, read the blog.

AWS Snowball

Accelerate moving offline data or remote storage to the cloud

Benefits

Easily migrate petabytes of data to the cloud without limits in storage capacity or compute power.

Accelerate application performance in disconnected, austere edge environments and run compute workloads with little or no connectivity.

Protect your data in transit with Snowball’s ruggedized chassis, integrated logistics, and tamper-evident box, and get data to the right place quickly.

How AWS Snowball works

In the AWS Snowball console, select your preferred device, either AWS Snowball Edge Compute Optimized or AWS Snowball Edge Storage Optimized. Create a job with an Amazon S3 bucket, select Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) for tracking, and configure options like Amazon EC2 AMIs. AWS prepares and ships the device to you. Once the device arrives, power it up and use AWS OpsHub to unlock it. Connect to your LAN. Use AWS OpsHub to manage the device, transfer data, or launch EC2 instances. When done, shut down and return the device to AWS. The shipping label automatically appears on the E Ink screen. When the device arrives at the AWS Region, any data stored in your on-board bucket(s) is moved to your S3 bucket and verified in about the same time it took you to load the device. All data is then securely erased from the device, and it is sanitized of any customer information.

Use cases

Move databases, backups, archives, healthcare records, analytics datasets, IoT sensor data and media content to the cloud - especially when network conditions are limited.

Run Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) within Amazon EC2 and deploy AWS Lambda code on Snowball Edge devices with machine learning (ML) or other applications.

Collect and analyze on-site factory data to refine processes and improve safety, efficiency, and productivity.