AWS. Storage services
High level overview of some of AWS storage services
In this post we want to briefly go over the available AWS storage services. You can find more information about the subject on Cloud Storage on AWS. So without further ado let's review the options available to us.
Given that demands on a storage can vary depending on the application, it is natural that AWS, and any other cloud provider on that matter, offers a variety of storage services. The first service we look into is the S3 service.
The simple storage service (S3) is designed to store any type of data. It is a serverless service. Items in S3 are stored in buckets. As we add items to the buckets its size grows. In theory there is no limit on the size a bucket can get. We describe how to create a bucket in S3 via python in AWS. S3 Buckets.
The Glacier storage is the cheapest storage option in AWS. It is used for long term storage of data. Just like S3 is a serverless service. However, it is not as readily accessible as S3. Given this, typically Glacier storage is used for archiving data rather than storing data used on a daily basis.
The next storage type we will review is the elastic block store or EBS. This is a highly available and low latency storage type. It is specific for attaching it to servers launched with the Amazon EC2 service. You can visualize EBS as attaching a hard drive to your computer.
The AWS elastic file system (EFS) is network attached storage. This allows multiple servers to access one data source.
The AWS storage gateway enables hybrid storage between on premises environments and the AWS cloud. Frequently used data is cached and therefore it provides low latency.
An AWS Snowball device allows us to move data offline to the cloud.
In this post we did a very high level overview of some of the available storage options on AWS.