Storage on Amazon Web Services(AWS)
Cecure Intelligence Limited
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By John Toriola
Introduction
Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides a wide range of storage services designed to meet various needs and use cases, ranging from simple file storage to complex database management. AWS storage services are highly scalable, durable, secure, and flexible. They allow you to store and retrieve data from anywhere at any time.
AWS offers multiple storage options, including object storage (Amazon S3), block storage (Amazon EBS), file storage (Amazon EFS), archival storage (Amazon Glacier), and hybrid storage (Amazon Storage Gateway). Each storage service has its unique features and benefits, enabling you to choose the best one for your use case.
In addition, AWS storage services provide various pricing models, including pay-as-you-go, reserved capacity, and spot pricing. This allows you to choose the pricing model that best fits your budget and use case.
In this expose, we will go over the different storage services offered by AWS. We will compare them and try to see which is the best fit for different use cases.
Storage Types on AWS
AWS offers multiple storage options, including:
Let’s take a? deep dive into some of the storage types listed above.
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is an object storage service provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS). It is a highly scalable and durable storage service that allows you to store and retrieve any type of data, including documents, images, videos, and application backups.
An S3 bucket is a container for storing data in Amazon S3. It is similar to a folder or directory in a file system, but it can store an unlimited number of objects. Each object in an S3 bucket is identified by a unique key, which is a string that consists of the object name and any optional prefix or suffix.
S3 buckets can be accessed through the AWS Management Console, AWS SDKs, or the S3 REST API. You can upload, download, and delete objects in an S3 bucket, and you can set access policies to control who can access the bucket and its objects.
S3 buckets are highly durable and designed to provide 99.999999999% (11 9's) of data durability, meaning that your data is protected against accidental deletion, hardware failures, and natural disasters. You can also configure lifecycle policies to automatically transition objects to different storage classes or delete them when they are no longer needed.
Buckets on AWS are also highly scalable, allowing you to store and retrieve any amount of data at any time. You can easily scale your storage capacity up or down as needed without any upfront costs.
In summary, buckets provide a simple and flexible way to store and retrieve data in the cloud. They are highly durable, scalable, and secure, making them an ideal choice for a wide range of use cases, from backup and archiving to big data analytics and content distribution.
Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store)
Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) is a block-level storage service provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS). It is designed to provide persistent storage for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances.
EBS volumes are similar to hard drives or SSDs in a traditional server environment. They can be attached to an EC2 instance as a block device, allowing the instance to access and use the storage as if it were a local disk. EBS volumes are highly available and durable, with built-in replication and automatic failover mechanisms.
EBS offers several volume types, including General Purpose SSD (gp2), Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1), Throughput Optimized HDD (st1), and Cold HDD (sc1). Each volume type is optimized for different use cases, providing varying levels of performance, throughput, and cost.
EBS volumes can be encrypted using AWS Key Management Service (KMS), providing an extra layer of security for your data. You can also take snapshots of your EBS volumes, allowing you to back up your data and create new volumes from the snapshots as needed.
EBS volumes are highly scalable, allowing you to increase or decrease the volume size and performance as your needs change. You can also attach multiple EBS volumes to a single EC2 instance, providing additional storage capacity and redundancy.
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In summary, Amazon EBS provides a reliable, scalable, and cost-effective way to store and access persistent data for Amazon EC2 instances. It offers multiple volume types, encryption options, and snapshot features, making it a versatile storage solution for a wide range of use cases.
Amazon EFS (Elastic File System)
Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) is a fully-managed file storage service provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS). It is designed to provide scalable, highly available, and secure file storage for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances and other compute resources.
EFS provides a common file system that can be accessed by multiple EC2 instances simultaneously, allowing you to share data across your applications and workloads. EFS supports the NFSv4 protocol, which is widely used in Linux and Unix environments.
The service is highly scalable, allowing you to easily increase or decrease the storage capacity and throughput as your needs change. It can automatically scale up or down based on the amount of data stored and the level of access traffic. EFS also supports lifecycle policies, allowing you to automatically move files between storage classes based on access patterns.
EFS is highly available and durable, with data automatically replicated across multiple availability zones within a region. This provides high availability and data durability, ensuring that your data is always available and protected against hardware failures and natural disasters.
The service also supports encryption at rest and in transit, providing an extra layer of security for your data. You can use AWS Key Management Service (KMS) to manage the encryption keys and policies.
In summary, Amazon EFS provides a scalable, highly available, and secure file storage solution for Amazon EC2 instances and other compute resources. It allows you to share data across multiple instances and workloads, and it supports encryption, lifecycle policies, and automatic scaling.
Let us now do some simple comparisons of the services we’ve analyzed above by trying to see which of them best solves some sample use cases.?
Use case for Elastic Block Store (EBS):?
One use case for Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) is when you need to run a database workload on an Amazon EC2 instance. Databases require consistent and high-performance storage, with low latency and high I/O throughput. EBS volumes, particularly the Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1) volume type, are specifically designed to meet these requirements.
In this use case, you can attach an EBS volume to your EC2 instance as a block device, and then mount it as a file system to store your database data. You can provision the EBS volume with the desired amount of storage capacity and IOPS, depending on your database workload requirements.
Use case for Elastic File System (EFS):
A good use case for Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) is when you need a highly scalable and shared file system that can be accessed by multiple EC2 instances. EFS is a fully managed, scalable, and elastic NFS file system that can be mounted on multiple EC2 instances simultaneously.
In this use case, you can use EFS to store and share files across multiple EC2 instances, making it ideal for applications that require shared file storage. This could include web applications that require shared access to static files, or big data applications that require shared access to input and output data.
Use case for Simple Storage Service (S3):
A good use case for Amazon S3 is when you need a highly scalable and durable object storage service to store and retrieve any type of data, such as photos, videos, documents, logs, and backups. S3 is a fully managed service that provides high availability, durability, and security for your data.
In this use case, you can use S3 to store and manage large amounts of unstructured data, such as user-generated content, log files, and backups. S3 provides virtually unlimited storage capacity and can store objects up to 5 terabytes in size. S3 also provides high throughput for both read and write operations, making it ideal for applications that require fast access to large amounts of data.
Conclusion
In conclusion, AWS storage services provide a range of options to meet different storage needs, from object storage to file storage, block storage, and long-term archiving. They are highly scalable, secure, and durable, and offer a range of features such as versioning, access control, and encryption to ensure data protection and compliance. AWS storage services are a reliable choice for businesses and organizations of all sizes, from startups to large enterprises.
There are several other storage options available on AWS that we couldn’t touch on in this short write-up. Please visit https://aws.amazon.com/products/storage/ to learn more about other services.?