So for many people, they discover Amazon Web Services, they get hooked on Amazon Web Services and
then they realize I want to use it for everything.
And this sounds like I'm being silly, but keep in mind that there are enterprises, large enterprises
that went through this transition.
So the entire IT department was like, oh, yeah, this is cool.
And then everyone involved in the IT department goes, let's do everything in something like HWC.
But there are some challenges, as we'll see in this section.
Now, let's back up a moment here.
In the beginning before we had a line of products with this fun snowball name attached, Amazon Web
Services did create something called the Import Export Service.
And it was just a simple approach of, hey, yes, send us your data.
And it was really funny because you could send them a thumb drive, you could send them an external
hard drive.
They'd take your data in any way, shape or form that you wanted to send it to them.
If you had old DVDs with archived information, you're sending your data to RWC.
And this is even a service that is still mentioned in exams today.
So don't discount this.
Import export is the classic way where you're like, oh my gosh, I don't even have like a DVD reader
anymore to, like, get this information off here.
And, you know, certainly the folks at Amazon have access to getting your data off any media.
So, again, you would just get your data to them in that kind of informal methodology.
Well, that definitely gave rise to a more improved methodology, and especially where we're talking
large amounts of data.
I mean, let's face it, when we have a couple of gigs that we need to transfer to a WSC, this is something
that we can have run over night.
And, you know, there's ways in which we can handle this with Internet connections.
But what about larger quantities of data and what about sensitive data where we want to make sure that
the data is transferred securely, not just efficiently?
That brought rise to the snowball concept.
And here you can see the classic snowball device.
So it is this super rugged shipping container inside.
It is the drives that are going to be highly reliable and really fast.
And you take this device that A.W. ships to you.
You connect it to your data center and you transfer the information to it, and then you ship the snowball
back to a WC and they do the transfer of your information into the cloud.
There's GPS tracking on this.
And, you know, there's all kinds of safeguards and encryption that is done on the device by default
and all these great ways to make sure the snowball is a very, very secure way in which and reliable
way for you to get your data into the cloud.
But what is interesting is there was then an evolution of this to what's called the snowball edge device.
And this is really cool and exciting.
This device is shipped out to you and this device stays at your data center for well, could be forever.
But in a lot of implementations, it would be kind of a temporary solution as a full blown cloud migration
is going on.
But the point I need to make is that, yeah, it could be something where you're going to keep it there
for the indefinite future.
What's going on with Snowball Edge is that it has services inside of it.
So now you're bringing a W.S. services like potentially to, for instance, right to the edge of your
data center.
So this is much smarter than a snowball device.
Remember, the snowball device is really intended for shipping, but the snowball edge is intended to
park right at the data center location of your choice and to bring services right to the edge of your
network.
And so it's very much like a gateway device.
And this reminds us of the storage gateway capabilities.
So a.
Goes beyond what would be possible with, like the storage gateway, very, very interesting and I hope
some day where I have the kind of time to investigate this solution more, it's just that in the classic
RWC certifications, we don't need to know that many details about Snowball Edge.
Just the information I've given you here about what it is and what it does is typically all we need
to know.
But hopefully I'll have the time and maybe even an excuse to delve deeper into exactly how snowball
edge works and what services you can have and things of that nature.
Now, what if your enterprise has, let's say, exabytes or petabytes of data that is going to want
to be migrated to the cloud?
Well, if you've got a big budget and you're ready to move all that stuff to the cloud, you can go
ahead and take advantage of the snowmobile.
And this is a real picture of the AWB Ignite conference where this was announced.
And, yes, they really did drive this snowmobile onto the stage.
This is a high tech version of the snowball.
It is going to be this ginormous, as you can see, 18 wheeler and it pulls up to your data center facility
and you connect your data center to the many, many, many storage devices that are inside it.
And you do the high speed transfer of all of this data into this truck.
It has armed guards that are then going to follow the truck as it moves the data to an RWC data center
location.
And it's pretty funny because you might think, well, really like, why wouldn't you just do a transfer?
You know, that might take months.
And the answer is, well, for large companies with massive amounts of data, it wouldn't take months.
It would take decades for the data transfer to complete using the fastest win technologies we know of
today.
So the snowmobile is the solution for absolutely massive data sets that we want to move to the cloud
that would take decades to do using the fastest technology of today.
So when it comes to the Snowball family, let's make sure that as a solutions architect, you're familiar
with Snowball, Snowball Edge and the snowmobile.
And I hope I've made it clear for you in this video just how each is going to potentially find its way
into your overall cloud solution.