As we work with our customers with their cloud adoption and expansion, getting on-premise data to the cloud in a fast, secure and a cost effective way has been one of our key focus areas.

Early this week our cloud partner AWS announced a couple of new services & enhancements that help customers move their data from on premise to the cloud in a fast and an efficient manner.We took these for a test drive and are excited to bring it you.

Starting with S3 Transfer acceleration – In addition to directly uploading your data to an S3 endpoint location, it is now possible to use an edge location as a bridge before uploading your data S3. Since the number of edge locations are significantly more and the possibility of a edge location being closer to you than the actual S3 location is higher, the data transfer acceleration is natural. The S3 transfer acceleration is a bucket specific feature.

Enabling S3 transfer acceleration is easy via the AWS console. You can find this new option under the bucket properties section in S3. Just click on the enable button to enable / suspend transfer acceleration.

It is important to note here that transfer acceleration is useful only in cases where you are closer to an edge location than the actual availability zone where your S3 bucket resides. You can check this by using a neat utility that will check your transfer speed to S3 using transfer acceleration (edge location) and without it, i.e. directly to S3. You can find a link to the tool also under the bucket properties section.

Once transfer acceleration is enabled you will get a new endpoint to use for s3 transfers using edge locations, similar to the one below

ctrworld-public.s3-accelerate.amazonaws.com

We can use this new endpoint for faster data transfers to S3, however there will be an additional charge for this.

You can also continue to use your previous endpoint of your bucket for regular S3 transfers.

AWS Snowball – During the re:Invent last year AWS introduced it’s snowball appliance service, to help streamline the use of hard disk based disk transfers. It allowed customers to rent out a secure hard disk from AWS and use it for data transfer rather than purchasing a compatible hard disk. This year, snowball is available in even more regions and with larger configurations. We strongly encourage our customers to use snowball for large volume data transfers.