Get Started with the Implementation Guide

15 Steps  |  About 1 week

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When planning on getting your data into the cloud as a part of an application migration or a data center shutdown, you will run into the hard limits of data transport. When your Internet speeds are not enough to keep up with your data migration plan, it’s time to consider Amazon Snowball. The Snowball appliance allows you to move archives, data lakes, and whatever data you have at faster-than Internet speeds right into Amazon S3 buckets. From Amazon S3, data can be archived into Glacier or analyzed by other services such as Amazon Redshift or EMR. This implementation guide will get you started with Amazon Snowball's quick, simple, and secure process for migrating large amounts of data into Amazon Web Services.

What you'll accomplish:

Create a data import job using the Amazon Web Services Console. Afterwards, Amazon Web Services will prepare and ship a Snowball appliance to the address you specified.

Transfer your data onto the Snowball using the client. Then ship the Snowball back to Amazon Web Services. The integrated E-Ink label on the Snowball makes this easy for you by automatically updating with the return address. There is no packaging necessary, as the Snowball is its own shipping container.

See your data securely imported into the cloud and stored in Amazon S3. When we receive the Snowball from you, we will import your data into Amazon S3 buckets. After the import is completed, the appliance is erased for your protection in accordance with NIST media sanitation standards.

What you'll need before starting:

Lots of data: Snowball is designed for large-scale data transfers. To keep things cost-efficient, we recommend using Snowball if you have at least 12 TB of data you would like to move to the cloud.

An Amazon Web Services Account: You will need an Amazon Web Services account to begin provisioning Amazon S3 buckets to store your data and to request a Snowball appliance. Sign up for Amazon Web Services.

An Amazon IAM User: Set up an Amazon Identity and Access Mangement (IAM) User to access Snowball. See Create an IAM User for more information. 

IT Skill level: You will need a basic understanding of storage and networking technologies and familiarity with the command line interface for Linux, Mac, or Windows.

Amazon Web Services Experience: No previous experience with Amazon Web Services is needed to follow this guide.

Get Started with the Implementation Guide

Need more resources to get started with Amazon Web Services? Visit the Getting Started Resources Center to learn more.