Snowcone, Snowball Edge, and Snowmobile
~8 min read
Physical devices scaled from a few terabytes to exabytes for offline data transfer.
AWS Snowcone is a small, rugged, portable device (a few TB of storage) designed for space- and power-constrained environments — edge locations, vehicles, or field deployments — that can also run limited edge compute workloads before data is shipped back to AWS.
AWS Snowball Edge comes in storage-optimized and compute-optimized variants, offering tens of terabytes of storage and, notably, onboard compute (it can run EC2 instances and Lambda functions locally) — useful both for bulk data migration and for edge computing scenarios where data needs local processing before or instead of being shipped to AWS at all.
AWS Snowmobile is a literal shipping-container-sized truck, designed for truly exabyte-scale migrations that would be impractical even with multiple Snowball devices — an extreme-scale option used by a small number of the largest data migrations (entire data center exits) rather than a common everyday tool.
All Snow Family devices encrypt data using keys you control, and importantly, none of them are a permanent storage solution — they're transfer mechanisms; once data lands in S3 (or wherever the migration target is), the device itself is returned to AWS and wiped.
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Key points
- •Snowcone: smallest, portable, for edge/space-constrained environments, some onboard compute
- •Snowball Edge: tens of TB, storage or compute-optimized variants, runs EC2/Lambda locally
- •Snowmobile: exabyte-scale, a literal truck, for the largest data center exit migrations
- •All are transfer mechanisms, not permanent storage — data lands in AWS, device is returned and wiped