AWS Snowball is a service that accelerates transferring large amounts of data into and out of AWS using physical storage appliances, bypassing the Internet. Each AWS Snowball appliance type can transport data at faster-than internet speeds. This transport is done by shipping the data in the appliances through a regional carrier. The appliances are rugged shipping containers, complete with E Ink shipping labels.

With a Snowball, you can transfer hundreds of terabytes or petabytes of data between your on-premises data centers and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). AWS Snowball uses Snowball appliances and provides powerful interfaces that you can use to create jobs, transfer data, and track the status of your jobs through to completion. By shipping your data in Snowballs, you can transfer large amounts of data at a significantly faster rate than if you were transferring that data over the Internet, saving you time and money.