AWS Official Blog

We launched AWS Import/Export Snowball last year at AWS re:Invent (see my blog post, AWS Import/Export Snowball – Transfer 1 Petabyte Per Week Using Amazon-Owned Storage Appliances, to learn more).

At launch time, you had the ability to use this appliance-based model to move large amounts of data (generally 10 terabytes or more) to AWS. This aspect of Snowball is working well and many customers are already making great use of it.

Export Using Snowball
Today, we are making the same model available for data export operations. If you have collected, generated, or stored large terabytes or petabytes of data in AWS and need to get to it more quickly than you could via a network connection, you can now use AWS Import/Export Snowball instead.

You simply log in to the AWS Management Console, create an export request, and specify the data to be exported. A single request can span one or more Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) buckets. The service will determine how many appliances are needed (each one can hold up to 50 terabytes) and create the export jobs accordingly. The appliances will be prepared, data will be copied to them, and they will be shipped to the address specified in the request. You can track each of these steps using the Console.

As is the case with the existing data import operation, the data stored on the appliance is encrypted using keys that you specify. The keys are not stored on the device.

If your data is stored in Amazon Glacier, you will first need to restore it to S3 (read Restoring Objects to learn more).

When you receive the appliance(s), you simply connect them to your local network, copy the data to local storage, and then tell the service that your are done. The shipping label on the appliance will be updated to display the return address so that you can return the appliance to us.

Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week:

New & Notable Open Source

• Claudia.js helps to deploy Node.js microservices to AWS easily.
• condensation helps to package, reuse, and share particles for CloudFormation projects.
• enhanced-snapshots manages backups for servers running on AWS.
• aws-services are microservices that provide various conveniences when managing AWS.
• gradle-aws-apigateway-plugin is a Gradle plugin that provides automated management of API Gateway resources.
• aws-bootstrap launches a new, minimum VPC on AWS.
• aws-wrapper is a set of scripts for common interactions with AWS.
• Lambda-AWS-New-AD-User-Email sends an email to new Active Directory users.
• FSharp.DynamoDB is an F# wrapper API for DynamoDB.
• lambda-scraper-queue shows how to create a simple web scraping service using Lambda and API Gateway.

New Customer Success Stories

• The Cleveland Clinic -The Cleveland Clinic runs its Healthy Brains Initiative on AWS and can protect confidential patient data with the built-in security and compliance features of the AWS cloud.
• National Instruments -National Instruments (NI) reduced testing costs by more than $1 million and shaved months off its software development process by using AWS.
• Prezi – Using Amazon Redshift and other AWS data services, Prezi has enabled its employees to quickly obtain data to improve the company’s service offerings and help executives identify new revenue opportunities
• Vinomofo – By launching its website on AWS, Vinomofo was able scale seamlessly to support increases in visitor numbers from 100 during off-peak periods to 12,000 during peak events.

New YouTube Videos

• Introduction to Amazon WorkSpaces.
• AWS Support – In our Customer’s Words.
• AWS Summit Series 2015 – Barcelona Highlights.

Upcoming Events

• AWS Webinars for February and Early March 2016.
• March 2