AWS Storage
AWS storage services are grouped into three categories.
File Storage
In file storage, data is stored as files in a hierarchy. Its similar to files stored in our computer. Each file will have a metadata such as file name, file size, and the date of the file being created.
Use cases of file storage are:
File storage systems are often supported with a network-attached storage (NAS) server.
Block Storage
In block storage, data is stored in fixed-size blocks.Block storage splits files into fixed-size chunks of data called blocks that have their own addresses.Because each block is addressable, blocks can be retrieved efficiently. This storage type is chosen when the data needs to be regularly modified.
Use cases of block storage are:
Block storage in the cloud is analogous to direct-attached storage (DAS) or a storage area network (SAN).
Object Storage
Object storage, data is stored as objects in buckets. Objects such as files are treated as single distinct unit of data when stored.When you want to change one character in an object, the entire object must be updated.
Use cases of object storage are:
File Storage with EFS and FSx
Amazon Elastic File System (AWS EFS)
It is a set-and-forget file system that automatically grows and shrinks as you add and remove files. There is no need for provisioning or managing storage capacity and performance.
EFS is mainly used in compute services and can connect tens, hundreds, and even thousands of compute instances to an Amazon EFS file system at the same time, and Amazon EFS can provide consistent performance to each compute instance.
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Amazon FSx
Amazon FSx is a fully managed service that offers reliability, security, scalability, and a broad set of capabilities that make it convenient and cost effective to launch, run, and scale high-performance file systems in the cloud.
Block Storage with Amazon EC2 Instance Store and Amazon EBS
Amazon EC2 instance store
Instance store provides temporary block-level storage for an instance. This storage is located on disks that are physically attached to the host computer.
If the instance is deleted , the instance store is also deleted. Basically it is the memory which comes with the VM is referred as Instance store. The main use of this storage is to cache data for performing analytics etc.
Amazon EBS
Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) is block-level storage that you can attach to an Amazon EC2 instance. It is like the external Hard drive to computer.
It can be attached to the instance. Even if the VM goes down data is secure and safe. It has a limitation of 2TB. At any given point of time only 1 VM can be connected to EBS.
Object Storage with Amazon S3
Amazon S3
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is a standalone storage solution that isn’t tied to compute. With S3 data can be accessed from anywhere on the web. You can imagine S3 as cloud storage for your computer. In S3, you store your objects in containers called buckets.
