AWS Snowcone: A rugged portable NAS to migrate data to the cloud

Another member of the AWS Snow family, which is focused on helping with data migration, will now be called Snowcone. It is a portable and rugged case with a weight of 2 kg and a size of 23 x 7 cm and which can offer up to 8 TB of storage. It can easily slip into a bag and even be carried by drones.

Under the hood, Snowcone has two CPUs and 4 GB of memory. It includes a USB-C port for its power supply as well as wireless and wired connectivity. A backup battery is available as an option. There is enough power to run EC2 instances and the IoT Greengrass platform. AWS is targeting this hardware for workloads where space, power, and cooling are limited, such as oil rigs or emergency vehicles, or in conflict zones.

A focus on edge computing and IoT

Jeff Bar, chief evangelist at AWS gives some indications in a blog on the uses of Snowcone: “data migration, content distribution and edge computing, but also IoT, transport, logistics, health and the case of autonomous vehicles ”. It also insists that the case is secure, rugged, water and dust resistant and transfers data through the AWS DataSync service. Otherwise, the device might be physically sent by Amazon to an AWS cloud region. In this case, when starting the solution, only the East (Northern Virginia) and West (Oregon) regions are available. Others will be added over time. Once received, the data encrypted in 256 bits (whose keys are managed by KMS) from the Snowcone are transferred to an S3 bucket. The data is then completely erased from the device so that it can be used again.

The cloud provider is therefore expanding its catalog for data migration. Snowcone adds a portable and edge brick compared to Snowball launched in 2015 that can transfer up to 50 TB of data (since increased to 100 TB). Note that AWS also offers a large container, Snowmobile, which can store several exabytes of data.