AWS Storage Services Overview

AWS Storage Services

• AWS offers different storage options/services:
  • EBS (Elastic Block Store) - Block storage
  • EFS (Elastic File System) / FSx - File storage (expensive)
  • S3 (Simple Storage Service) - Object storage (cheap)
  • File Cache

Amazon S3

• Amazon S3 is an object storage solution offering high levels of availability, durability, and scalability
• It handles over 100 trillion objects, averaging 100 million customer requests per second
• Request traffic peaks at over 950 TB/second globally

Object Store

• An object store is a flat file structure where data is stored as objects consisting of a globally unique identifier, metadata, and the data itself
• Each object's globally unique identifier (GUID) is also known as its key
• Object storage is useful for replicating data between development and production accounts and for compliance with data-residency laws

Amazon S3 Storage Classes

• S3 Standard for frequently accessed data
• S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA) and S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access (S3 One Zone-IA) for less frequently accessed data
• S3 Intelligent-Tiering for automatic cost savings for data with unknown or changing access patterns
• S3 Express One Zone for frequently accessed data
• S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval for archive data that needs immediate access
• S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval for rarely accessed long-term data that does not require immediate access
• S3 Glacier Deep Archive for long-term archive and digital preservation with retrieval in hours at the lowest cost storage in the cloud

Archiving with Amazon S3 Glacier

• Amazon S3 Glacier is a low-cost, durable, and secure storage class for data archiving
• It allows reliable storage of any amount of data at cheaper costs
• Steps to use Amazon S3 Glacier:
  1. Create a bucket
  2. Enable "static website hosting"
  3. Edit Block Public Access settings
  4. Add a bucket policy that makes your bucket content publicly available
  5. Configure an index document
  6. Configure an error document (optional)
  7. Test your website endpoint

EBS and S3 Comparison

• EBS:
  • Stores data as blocks
  • Block size can be up to 16 tebibytes each (17.6 terabytes)
  • Offers faster performance than AWS S3
  • Data does not suffer loss, degradation, or corruption
  • Data can be modified directly
• S3:
  • Stores data as objects
  • Individual object size can be up to 5,000 gigabytes (5 terabytes)
  • Data can be modified only by re-uploading

Additional S3 Features

• S3 data protection/encryption
• Connecting on-premises storage to AWS with Amazon Storage Gateway
• Migrating large datasets to AWS with the AWS Snow Family

Key Points

• Amazon S3 offers a robust, scalable, durable, and cost-effective object storage solution in the cloud
• S3 Glacier provides three retrieval options for archiving data, with 99.999999999% durability
• Using S3 Glacier can reduce costs by 95% compared to S3 Standard