Let me start by highlighting when you would likely select the AWS Snowcone as your snow device of choice.

You would use the snowcone if you: 

• Needed a portable lightweight device that you could easily carry to difficult to reach locations and environments to perform compute and storage operations
• Only had a requirement for a maximum of 8TB of storage
• If you needed the ability to perform online data transfer using AWS DataSync, preventing you the need to send the Snowcone back to AWS for an off-line data transfer
• If you didn’t have a consistent power support and you needed the support of a battery pack.

When it comes to real-world use cases, here are a couple of examples where the Snowcone would perform well.

The snowcone is perfectly suited to provide a level of portable edge computing allowing you to collect data from wireless sensors or networked resources, for example in locations such as industrial warehouses or manufacturing plants, where you might need to collect environmental metric data.  By collecting and gathering data it can then be transferred to AWS offline, or it can be transferred online using AWS DataSync, which can then be analyzed at scale using other AWS services.

Due to its small size, it can even be stored in a standard backpack, or even fitted to a drone to capture and record image data! 

With storage capabilities of up to 8TB of usable HDD storage from a single snowcone, it easily allows you to provide a means of securely storing and transferring a large amount of data into AWS, and you can if required run multiple Snowcones in parallel allowing you to transfer 10’s of terabytes of data if required.  Being of rugged design and portable, the devices can be used in remote locations, such as mining and oil sectors, or even in the travel industry, fitted to trucks, trains, and boats, providing a mechanism of easily collecting data and then transferring it back to AWS.

Another common use case is from within the media and entertainment industry, the Snowcone can be used as a way to aggregate data from multiple sources before shipping it back to AWS for transfer into Amazon S3.  You might have video and audio data from multiple feeds, especially if you are working in the film or music industry, this data can then be aggregated to your snowcone device and shipped back to AWS for further processing and editing from your wider production team.