In this lecture I want to answer 2 simple questions:

1. What is the snow family 
2. and what does it consist of?

So firstly, what is it? The snow family consists of a range of physical hardware devices that are all designed to enable you to transfer data into AWS from the edge or beyond the Cloud, such as your Data Center, but they can also be used to transfer data out of AWS too, for example, from Amazon S3 back to your Data Centre. 

It’s unusual when working with the cloud to be talking about physical devices or components, normally your interactions and operations with AWS generally happen programmatically via a browser or command line interface.  The snow family is different, instead, you will be sent a piece of hardware packed with storage and compute capabilities to perform the required data transfer outside of AWS, and when complete, the device is then sent back to AWS for processing and the data uploaded to Amazon S3.

You can perform data transfers from as little as a few terabytes using an AWS snowcone all the way up to a staggering 100 petabytes using a single AWS snowmobile, and I’ll be talking more about these different snow family members shortly.  Now of course when we are talking about migrating and transferring data at this magnitude, using traditional network connectivity is sometimes simply not feasible from a time perspective. For example, let’s assume you needed to transfer just 1petabye of data over a 1gbps using Direct Connect it would take 104 Days, 5 Hours 59 Minutes, 59.25 Seconds, not forgetting the cost of the data transfer fees too! 

In addition to these devices packing some serious storage capacity for data transfer, some of them also come fitted with compute power, allowing you to run usable EC2 instances that have been designed for the snow family enabling your applications to run operations in often remote and difficult to reach environments, even without having a data center in sight, and when working with a lack of persistent networking connectivity or power.  For example, the snowcone comes with the ability to add battery packs increasing their versatility.  The enablement of running EC2 instances makes it possible to use these devices at the edge to process and analyze data much closer to the source.      

So let’s now take a look at what the snow family consists of to get a better understanding of what these devices are.

As you can see from this table, both from a physical and capacity perspective, the snowcone is the smallest followed by the snowball and finally the snowmobile.  You may also notice that the snowball comes in 3 choices, compute optimized, compute optimized with GPU, and storage optimized, each offering a different use case, however, each of these 3 offerings all come in the same size device.