AWS Launches Faster S3 Transfers & Bigger Snowballs

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is all about moving more data onto to the cloud. AWS knows that in order to get more and more customers to move their data and workloads to the cloud they need to make it faster and easy for them. This week AWS made a couple announcements centered on just that, making Amazon S3 transfers faster (from 50-500% improvements) and a larger Amazon Snowball in some regions, up to 80TB.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is all about moving more data onto to the cloud. AWS knows that in order to get more and more customers to move their data and workloads to the cloud they need to make it faster and easy for them. This week AWS made a couple announcements centered on just that, making Amazon S3 transfers faster (from 50-500% improvements) and a larger Amazon Snowball in some regions, up to 80TB.

Leveraging its edge network, AWS will use this network to accelerate data transfers in and out of S3. This acceleration will be particular useful to customers that are transferring data across or between continents, have a fast Internet connection, use large objects, or have a lot of content to upload. The accelerating feature is as simple as checking a checkbox in AWS Management Console. AWS will route the transfer through the best edge location based on latency. Users will only have to pay for transfers where the acceleration could potentially improve performance.

AWS introduced their Snowball back in October. As we previously stated, The Snowball is specifically designed for customers and businesses that need to move large amounts of data to AWS on a one-time or recurring basis. As such, Amazon’s Snowball aims to get customer data into the cloud as fast as possible and thus has designed it so multiple Snowballs can be connected together as a daisy-chain. While there were some benefits to the Snowball it did not come out in all regions and it was limited to 50TB. AWS has both more capacity, up to 80TB, and can ship to more regions.

Availability and pricing

The accelerated transfers with S3 begin at $0.04/GB uploaded.

The Amazon Snowball is now available with the following pricing plan:

• Service Fee per Job: $250
• Extra Day Charge: First 10 days of onsite usage are free and each extra onsite day is $15
• Data Transfer:
  • Data transfer IN to Amazon S3 is $0.00 per GB
  • Data transfer OUT of Amazon S3 is $0.03 per GB​

Amazon Snowball

Amazon S3

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