Moving Data between AWS and On-premises - Snowball vs Snowmobile vs DataSync - AWS Certification Cheat Sheet


Let’s get a quick overview of Moving Data between AWS and On-premises - Snowball vs Snowmobile vs DataSync.

You will learn

  • What are the options for moving Data between AWS and On-premises?
  • How do they compare - Snowball vs Snowmobile vs DataSync?

Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration

  • Most basic option when you are transferring less data (upto a few terabytes) into S3
  • Uses Amazon CloudFront’s Edge Locations to enable fast transfer of files to/from your clients
  • Enable S3 Transfer Acceleration and use endpoints
    • s3-accelerate.amazonaws.com or
    • .s3-accelerate.dualstack.amazonaws.com

AWS Snowball

  • Transfer dozens of terabytes to petabytes of data from on-premises to AWS
  • 100TB (80 TB usable) per appliance
    • If needed, request multiple appliances
  • Involves physical shipping
  • Simple Process
    • Request for Snowball
    • Copy data
    • Ship it back
  • Manage jobs with AWS Snowball console
  • Data is automatically encrypted with KMS (AES-256)
  • Current versions of AWS Snowball use Snowball Edge devices
    • Provide both compute and storage
    • Pre-process data (using Lambda functions)
  • Choose between
    • Storage optimized (24 vCPUs, 32 GiB RAM)
    • Compute optimized(52 vCPUs, 208 GiB RAM)
    • Compute optimized with GPU
  • Choose Snowball if direct transfer takes over a week
    • 5TB can be transferred on 100Mbps line in a week at 80% utilization

AWS Snowmobile

  • How do I transfer dozens of petabytes to exabytes of data from on-premises to AWS for cloud migration?
  • 100PB storage per truck
  • If needed, use multiple trucks in parallel
  • Data is automatically encrypted with KMS (AES-256)

AWS DataSync - Transfer File Storage to Cloud

  • Secure and 10x faster (100s of TB) data transfers from/to AWS over internet or AWS Direct Connect
  • Transfer from on-premise file storage (NFS, SMB) to S3, EFS or FSx for Windows
  • Monitor progress using Amazon CloudWatch
  • (Use cases) Data Migration, Data replication and Cold data archival
  • (Alternative) Use AWS Snowball if you are bandwidth constrained or transferring data from remote, or disconnected
  • (Alternative) Use S3 Transfer Acceleration when your applications are integrated with S3 API. If not, prefer AWS DataSync(Supports multiple destinations, built-in retry)
  • (Integration) Migrate data using DataSync and use AWS Storage Gateway for ongoing updates from on-premises applications

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