Transfer Large Data with AWS Snowball Edge Over Slow Networks

Quick Answer

The deciding factor in this scenario is a straightforward bandwidth calculation: at 100 Mbps, only around 10.8 TB can realistically move over the internet in 10 days, which falls far short of the 50 TB that needs to be transferred, and no amount of connection tuning changes that fundamental math within the same bandwidth ceiling. AWS Snowball Edge solves this by sidestepping the network bottleneck entirely, it's a physical storage device that AWS ships to the company's data center, gets loaded with the data locally at local network speeds, and is then shipped back to AWS where the data is loaded into Amazon S3, which serves as the ultimate destination. Because the bulk of the data movement happens over physical shipping rather than the constrained internet link, the 10-day deadline becomes achievable regardless of the limited bandwidth. The other network-based options all fail for the same underlying reason: Direct Connect still requires enough bandwidth and, more importantly, provisioning time that doesn't fit a tight 10-day window; a Site-to-Site VPN still rides over the same internet connection and inherits its bandwidth limits; and DataSync run over the internet is likewise capped by that same 100 Mbps link. Whenever a question presents a large data volume, a tight deadline, and a bandwidth figure that clearly can't move that volume in time, that combination is the signal to reach for an offline physical-transfer device like Snowball rather than any purely network-based transfer service.