Amazon Web Services (AWS) today revealed some updates to its Snowball family of edge devices, including a new interface for managing clusters and a boost in performance and virtual CPUs (vCPU).

Snowball Edge Storage devices now feature 40 vCPUs compared to 24 in the previous version and 80 gigabytes of memory. Data transfer speeds have improved by up to 25%, and that increased speed rides on a new 100 gigabit networking adapter and a 3.2 GHz processor, according to AWS.

“The Snow family runs in the rugged edge,” Bill Vass, VP of technology at AWS explained during a webinar. Applications include oil rigs, ships, airplanes, movie shoots, and manufacturing floors. “A lot of the most valuable data for these industries like oil and gas, the military, and industrial is collected in places where it isn’t a great IT environment,” he said.

Snowball Edge devices can now be managed in a new graphical user interface called AWS OpsHub that IT professionals can use to unlock and configure devices, deploy applications, monitor device metrics, and automate operations, the company announced today. Developers can also write scripts for Snow devices in Python or PowerShell directly in the AWS OpsHub.

“We tried to make the OpsHub basically as consumer grade as possible so that anyone can use it, even people not familiar with AWS at all,” Vass said. “It allows you to manage your files, your S3 buckets, manage your file sizes, [and] it allows you to create clusters, so multiple snowballs.”

Additional new features include AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) for managing access to services and resources on Snowball Edge devices, and support for the AWS Systems Manager, which enables developers to automate maintenance and deployment tasks. 

AWS announced Snowball in 2015, added support for Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) in 2018, and brought block storage to Snowball Edge devices last year. “Tens of thousands of customers” are using Snowball Edge devices today, Vass said.