‫So now let's talk about the AWS Snow family.
‫So it represents a highly secure, portable devices
‫that has two use cases within AWS.
‫Either it's used to collect and process data at the edge
‫or to migrate data in and out of AWS.
‫So we have two use cases, the data migration,
‫and for this we have three different types
‫of devices within the Snow family.
‫We have the Snowcone, the Snowball Edge, and the Snowmobile.
‫And for the second use case, edge computing,
‫we have the Snowcone, and the Snowball Edge.
‫So we'll first tackle the data migration subject
‫and then the edge computing.
‫So why do we want to do data migration
‫with the AWS Snow family?
‫Well, if we look at the time it takes
‫to transfer a lot of data over the network,
‫it can take a lot of time.
‫So for example, if we want to transfer 100 terabytes
‫over a one gigabits per second network line,
‫it will take us 12 days to achieve it.
‫Okay?
‫And so obviously if we do a petabyte,
‫it will take forever, and so on.
‫So as we can see
‫sometimes we just want the data to get to AWS fast.
‫And the challenge is that sometimes
‫on top of having a small network transfer,
‫you have limited connectivity,
‫limited bitwidth, bandwidth, sorry,
‫transferring data over the network
‫may cost you some money, okay?
‫It's not free to use a network.
‫It could be that also the bandwidth is shared.
‫For example, if you download a video from AWS
‫and you download 10 terabytes of data, you know,
‫maybe you're going to block your entire office
‫because you're maximizing the bandwidth within your office,
‫and then maybe the connection is not stable enough
‫so you have to retry, and so on.
‫So all these reasons make a case for Snow family.
‫So the Snow family are offline devices
‫that allow you to perform data migrations.
‫So AWS will send you an actual physical device
‫by, you know, the post office,
‫and then you load your data onto it
‫and then you send it back to AWS.
‫So the rule of thumb is that if it takes more than a week
‫to transfer data over the network,
‫then you should use a Snowball device, for example.
‫So to really explain how that works, let's take an example.
‫If you wanted to directly upload a file into Amazon S3,
‫we have the clients sends the data into Amazon S3,
‫very easy, right?
‫But with the Snow family,
‫for example, with a Snowball device,
‫the client request a Snowball device,
‫we receive it via the post, okay?
‫AWS will deliver the device to us.
‫We load the data directly onto the devices locally,
‫and then we ship back the device to AWS,
‫into an AWS facility.
‫Then they will take the device
‫and they will plug it into their own infrastructure,
‫and then the data will be imported or exported,
‫based on what you want to do,
‫to an Amazon S3 bucket, and you're good to go.
‫So really it is a way to transfer data to AWS,
‫but through the physical route, not the network route.
‫Okay, so now what sort of devices do we have?
‫We have the Snowball Edge.
‫And Snowball Edge is a huge box as you can see,
‫and it is going to be used
‫to move terabytes or petabytes of data in and out of AWS.
‫It's going to be an alternative
‫to moving data over the network as we've seen.
‫We're going to pay per data transfer job.
‫And the interface within the Snowball Edge
‫is going to provide a block storage
‫or Amazon S3 compatible object storage.
‫So we have two flavors for the Snowball Edge.
‫We have the Snowball Edge Storage Optimized
‫which is going to give us 80 terabytes
‫of a hardware disk capacity,
‫which works for block volume
‫or S3 compatible object storage.
‫And we have the Snowball Edge Compute Optimized
‫of space of 42 TB or 28 TB.
‫So really, if we want to have more storage,
‫obviously we want to get the flavor
‫that is called Snowball Edge Storage Optimized.
‫So the use case for a Snowball Edge for data transfer so far
‫is to do a large data cloud migration
‫to decommission a data center
‫or maybe to do disaster recovery
‫by backing up your data into AWS.
‫Next we have the Snowcone.
‫So the Snowcone is a very small portable device.
‫And it's rugged, it's secure,
‫it can withstand harsh environment,
‫and it's meant for environments
‫where you have a little amount of data.
‫So it's light, it's like 2.1 kilograms,
‫and you can put it on a drone if you wanted to.
‫And it's going to be used
‫for edge computing, storage, and data transfer.
‫You have two flavors of it.
‫You have the Snowcone
‫which comes with eight terabytes of HDD storage,
‫and the Snowcone SSD of 14 terabytes of SSD storage
‫if you need a faster disk.
‫You will use the Snowcone where the Snowball does not fit,
‫for example, in the space constraint environment.
‫And you must provide your own batteries and cables.
‫Now, to send back the data to AWS, you have two options.
‫So either you send the data back offline by shipping it,
‫or you can connect this device,
‫after it has captured some data, into a data center,
‫for example, whatever that has an internet connection,
‫and then use the AWS DataSync service
‫to send the data back to AWS.
‫And then Snowmobile is an actual truck.
‫So when they announced it,
‫they actually took a truck on stage
‫to show that it was an actual truck,
‫that is going to transfer your data.
‫And so with the Snowmobile,
‫you can transfer exabytes of data.
‫So 1 exabyte is 1,000 petabytes, is 1 million terabytes.
‫And each Snowmobile will have 100 petabytes of capacity.
‫So if you wanted to reach one exabyte of data,
‫you need to order 10 Snowmobiles.
‫It's high security, it's temperature controlled,
‫it has GPS, 24/7 video surveillance.
‫So it's quite a secure way to transfer your data.
‫And it's a better use case than Snowball
‫if you start transferring more than 10 petabytes of data.
‫So as a summary, for data migration, we have three options.
‫We have Snowcone, Snowball Edge, Snowmobile.
‫And each come with different storage capacities.
‫So 8 terabytes, 80 terabytes, and 100 petabytes.
‫The migration size that's recommended by AWS is,
‫a Snowcone is up to 24 terabytes.
‫For Snowball Edge, it's up to petabytes,
‫and it's offline because you have to send it back to AWS.
‫And for Snowmobile, the use case is up to exabytes of data.
‫DataSync agent is pre-installed on a Snowcone
‫because you can plug it to your network
‫and have DataSync send the data
‫over the network to AWS as well.
‫And for Snowball Edge, you can do storage clustering.
‫So you can put up to 15 Snowball Edges together
‫to increase the storage size.
‫Okay, so how do we use a Snow family device?
‫Well, you request the device from the console for delivery
‫and we'll see this in the hands-on.
‫Then we install the Snowball clients
‫or we use AWS OpsHub,
‫that will see in this lecture, on your servers.
‫Then we connect the Snowball to the servers
‫and you start copying the files in your clients.
‫Then we ship back the device when we're ready.
‫It will go straight to the right AWS facility,
‫thanks to an E Ink marker.
‫And the data will be loaded onto an S3 bucket,
‫and then the Snowball will be completely wiped
‫according to the highest security measures.
‫So that's for the data migration,
‫and that was originally,
‫one and the only use case for Snowball devices.
‫But the second use case now for the Snow family
‫is called edge computing.
‫And so edge computing is when you process data
‫while it's being created at an edge location.
‫So what is an edge location?
‫Well, an edge location is anything
‫that really doesn't have internet
‫or that is far away from the cloud.
‫So for example, if you have a truck on the road
‫or if you have a ship on the sea
‫or a mining station on the ground,
‫all these things can be called edge locations,
‫because they can produce data
‫but they may not necessarily have internet connectivity.
‫So either limited connectivity
‫or no internet access or no access to computing power.
‫And so you may still want to run computation,
‫data processing at these locations.
‫And for this, we need edge computing.
‫And so to do edge computing,
‫we can order a Snowball edge device or a Snowcone,
‫and have it embedded into these edge locations,
‫and start doing edge computing.
‫So the use cases of edge computing is to pre-process data,
‫do machine learning at the edge,
‫so without it going back to the cloud,
‫transcode media streams in advance,
‫and eventually if need be,
‫if you need to transfer the data back into AWS,
‫you can ship back the device
‫for your Snowcone or your Snowball Edge.
‫So really you start processing the data very, very close
‫to where it's being created,
‫and then you ship it back to AWS.
‫So for edge computing, what do we have?
‫We have the Snowcone,
‫and it comes with two CPUs, four gigabytes of memory,
‫has wired or wireless access, so wifi,
‫it's powered by USB-C or an optional battery.
‫Then for Snowball Edge, it's compute optimized.
‫So we have the two different flavors again.
‫So the Compute Optimized one has 104 vCPUs,
‫416 gigabytes of RAM,
‫and an optional GPU
‫if you wanted to do video processing or machine learning.
‫We have up to 42 terabytes of usable storage.
‫And for the Snowball edge that is Storage Optimized,
‫we have 40 vCPU, 80 GB of RAM
‫and 80 TB of storage.
‫We have object storage clustering available for the storage.
‫And all of these devices
‫can run either EC2 instances within them
‫or Lambda functions
‫using the service called AWS IoT Greengrass.
‫And if you would do edge computing,
‫then you may want to have these devices
‫in your facilities, in your trucks,
‫in your boats for a very long time.
‫And so therefore you have long-term deployment options
‫where you can get a discounted pricing
‫if you borrow these devices for one or three years.
‫Finally, for the Snow family,
‫there is Snow, sorry, OpsHub.
‫So historically, when we're using these devices
‫you needed a CLI, so command line interface tool,
‫to deal with them, and it was very, very difficult.
‫And so AWS recognizes that.
‫And so they've created OpsHub, which is a software
‫that you install on your computer or laptop.
‫So it's not something you use on the cloud.
‫It's something you have to download on your computer.
‫And then once it's connected,
‫it's going to give you a graphical interface
‫to connect to your Snow devices,
‫and configure them and use them, which is very, very handy.
‫So this is obviously,
‫to do unlocking and configuring single or cluster devices,
‫transferring files, launching and managing instances,
‫so EC2 instances running on Snow family devices,
‫monitor device metrics,
‫and launch compatible AWS services on your devices.
‫For example, EC2 instances,
‫use DataSync or a network file system.
‫So that's it for the Snow family.
‫I hope you liked it, and I will see you in the next lecture.