AWS Snowball
AWS Snowball is an Amazon Web Services data transfer service that uses physical storage devices to transfer large amounts of data at high speed between Amazon S3 and an onsite data storage location.
Key points
- Discontinuations (read this first): AWS Snowmobile (the 100-petabyte truck-based transfer service) was retired in 2024 and is no longer offered. The original AWS Snowcone devices and the original 50 TB/80 TB AWS Snowball devices were discontinued for new orders on November 12, 2024, with support for existing customers ending November 12, 2025. As of November 7, 2025, AWS Snowball Edge is no longer available to new customers at all — new customers are directed to AWS DataSync for online transfer, AWS Data Transfer Terminal for offline physical transfer, AWS Partner solutions, or AWS Outposts for edge computing. AWS will discontinue support for all remaining Snowball Edge devices in AWS commercial Regions on December 31, 2026 (GovCloud and ADC Region customers with active jobs are unaffected).
- Existing customers’ current device lineup is AWS Snowball Edge, in two configurations: Storage Optimized (210 TB usable NVMe storage) and Compute Optimized (104 vCPUs, 416 GB usable RAM, 28 TB dedicated NVMe SSD) (older CLF-C02 material still cites the discontinued 50 TB/80 TB Snowball devices and moving a petabyte of data with fourteen 80 TB Snowballs).
- Uses AWS Key Management Service (KMS) to protect data in transit securely.
- If data transfer is less than 10 TB, there is no need to use Snowball.
- The Snowball client and the Amazon S3 Adapter for Snowball perform data transfers on the device locally.
- Large, multi-job transfers can be split into smaller parallel segments for faster transfer.
- Integrated with Amazon Cloudtrail to capture API calls as events, and with Amazon SNS to notify about data transfer status.
- Snowball Edge devices support running Amazon Machine Image (AMI)-based EC2 instances and deploying AWS Lambda code on the device for local processing and analysis; devices can be clustered across 3–16 units for local data durability and to grow or shrink storage on demand.
- Rule of thumb: use a Snow Family device rather than network transfer whenever moving the data over the existing network connection would take longer than about one week.
- Distinct from AWS Outposts, which permanently extends AWS infrastructure and services on-premises; Snowball Edge is a temporary device for data transfer and short-term edge-computing jobs, not a standing on-premises AWS environment.