What is AWS Snowball Edge? - Explain Features of Snowball Edge

The AWS Snowball Edge is a type of Snowball device with on-board storage and compute power for select AWS capabilities. Snowball Edge can undertake local processing and edge-computing workloads in addition to transferring data between your local environment and the AWS Cloud.

Each Snowball Edge device can transport data at speeds faster than the internet. This transport is done by shipping the data in the appliances through a regional carrier. The appliances are rugged shipping containers, complete with E Ink shipping labels. The AWS Snowball Edge device differs from the standard Snowball because it can bring the power of the AWS Cloud to your on-premises location, with local storage and compute functionality.

Snowball Edge devices have three options for device configurations – storage optimized, compute optimized, and with GPU. When this guide refers to Snowball Edge devices, it's referring to all options of the device. Whenever specific information applies only to one or more optional configurations of devices, like how the Snowball Edge with GPU has an on-board GPU.



Prerequisites for Using Snowball Edge


Before creating your first job, keep the following in mind.

For jobs where you import data into Amazon S3, take these steps:

Create an AWS account with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) administrator-level permissions. For more information, see Setting Up Your AWS Access for AWS Snowball Edge.

Confirm that the files and folders to transfer are named according to the object key naming guidelines for Amazon S3. Any files or folders with names that don't meet these guidelines aren't imported into Amazon S3.

Plan what data you want to import into Amazon S3. For more information, see How to Transfer Petabytes of Data Efficiently.

Before exporting data from Amazon S3, take these steps:


Understand what data is exported when you create your job. For more information, see Using Export Ranges.


For any files with a colon (:) in the file name, change the file names in Amazon S3 before you create the export job to get these files. Files with a colon in the file name fail export to Microsoft Windows Server.
 

Features oF Snowball Edge

Snowball Edge devices have the following features:

• Large amounts of storage capacity or compute functionality for devices, depending on the options you choose when you create your job.
  
• Network adapters with transfer speeds of up to 100 GB/second.
  
• Encryption is enforced, protecting your data at rest and in physical transit.
  
• You can import or export data between your local environments and Amazon S3, physically transporting the data with one or more devices, completely bypassing the internet.
  
• AWS Snowball Edge devices are their own rugged shipping containers, and the built-in E Ink display changes to show your shipping label when the device is ready to ship.
  
• Snowball Edge devices come with an on-board LCD display that can be used to manage network connections and get service status information.
  
• You can cluster Snowball Edge devices for local storage and compute jobs to achieve 99.999 percent data durability across 5–10 devices, and to locally grow and shrink storage on demand.
  
• You can use the file interface to read and write data to an AWS Snowball Edge device through a file share or Network File System (NFS) mount point.
  
• You can write Python-language Lambda functions and associate them with Amazon S3 buckets when you create an AWS Snowball Edge device job. Each function triggers whenever there's a local Amazon S3 PUT object action executed on the associated bucket on the appliance.
  
• Snowball Edge devices have Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2 compatible endpoints available, enabling programmatic use cases.
  
• Snowball Edge devices support the new sbe1, sbe-c, and sbe-g instance types, which you can use to run compute instances on the device using Amazon Machine Images (AMIs).

 

AWS Snowball Edge Services

You can use AWS Snowball with an AWS Snowball Edge device with the following related AWS services:

• Amazon S3 – You can use the Amazon S3 Adapter for Snowball, which supports a subset of the Amazon S3 API actions, to transfer data onto an AWS Snowball Edge device. You can do this in a single AWS Snowball Edge device or in a cluster of devices for increased data durability. In addition, you can import data hosted on an AWS Snowball Edge device into Amazon S3 and your local environment through a shipped AWS Snowball Edge device. For more information on using Amazon S3, see the Amazon Simple Storage Service Getting Started Guide.
  
• Amazon EC2 – You can use the Amazon EC2 compatible endpoint, which supports a subset of the Amazon EC2 API actions, to run compute instances on a Snowball Edge device. For more information on using Amazon EC2 in AWS, see Amazon EC2 Getting Started Guide.
  
• AWS Lambda powered by AWS Greengrass –
  
  You can trigger Lambda functions based on Amazon S3 storage actions made on an AWS Snowball Edge device. These Lambda functions are associated with an AWS Snowball Edge device during job creation. For more information on using Lambda, see the AWS Lambda Developer Guide.