AWS Technical Essentials 2025 – 400 Free Practice Questions to Pass the Exam

The purpose of AWS Snowball is to transfer large amounts of data using physical appliances. AWS Snowball is designed to facilitate secure and efficient data transfers into and out of the AWS Cloud. When organizations need to move vast quantities of data—for instance, during cloud migrations or data archiving—they can use Snowball appliances, which are rugged, portable devices that enable this process efficiently.

Using Snowball is beneficial because conventional internet transfers can be time-consuming and sometimes unreliable, especially when dealing with terabytes or petabytes of information. Snowball helps minimize transfer times by securely transporting physical devices containing data directly to AWS data centers. The devices come equipped with built-in encryption and are designed to handle the physical transport and security of sensitive data.

The other options do not accurately define the primary function of AWS Snowball. While data encryption is a feature used during the process, it is not the main purpose. Likewise, monitoring cloud service usage and creating virtual machines are tasks associated with other AWS services, such as AWS CloudWatch and AWS EC2, respectively. Therefore, the key function of AWS Snowball is indeed the physical transfer of large amounts of data.