AWS Snowball
AWS Snowball is a hardware appliance designed to move massive amounts of data between your site and the AWS cloud in a short time. Some common use cases for Snowball include the following:
- Migrating data from an office or data center to the AWS cloud
- Quickly transferring a large amount of data to or from S3 for backup or recovery purposes
- Distributing large volumes of content to customers and partners
The idea behind Snowball is that it’s quicker to physically ship a large amount of data than it is to transfer it over a network. For instance, suppose you want to migrate a 40 TB database to AWS. Such a transfer even over a blazing-fast 1 Gbps connection would still take more than 4 days!
But instead, for a nominal fee, AWS will send you a Snowball device. You simply transfer your files to it and ship it back. When AWS receives it, AWS transfers the files from Snowball to one or more S3 buckets. You’re not charged any transfer fees for importing files into...
