Storage Services

• Types of Storage Services:

  1. Elastic Block Store (EBS) - Data is split into evenly split blocks. Directly accessed by Operating System. Supports only Single write volume.
  2. AWS Elastic File Storage (EFS) - File is stored with data and metadata. Multiple connections via a network share. Supports multiple reads, writing locks the file.
  3. Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) - Object is stored with data, metadata and Unique ID. Scales with no file limit or storage limit. Supports multiple reads and writes (no lock)
• Object Storage is a data storage architecture that manages data as objects, as opposed to other storage architectures.
• File Systems is a storage architecture which manages data as a file and file hierarchy.
• Block storage is a storage architecture which manages data as as blocks within sectors and tracks.
• S3 provides you with unlimited storage.
• S3 Objects are objects that contain your data.
• S3 Objects consists of the following:

  1. Key - the name of the object.
  2. Value - the data itself made up of sequences of bytes.
  3. Version ID - when versioning enabled, it is the version of the object.
  4. Metadata - additional information attached to the object.
• S3 Bucket are buckets that hold objects.
• S3 buckets can have folders which in turn hold objects.
• S3 bucket is a universal namespace so names must be unique.
• S3 individual object can store from 0 bytes to 5 terabyte size.
• S3 Storage Classes

  AWS offers range of S3 storage classes that trade Retrieval, Time, Accessibility and Durability for Cheaper Storage.
• S3 Standard (Default) is a type of storage class. Fast. 99.99% availability. 11 9's durability. Replicated across at least 3 AZ's
• S3 Intelligent Tiering is a type of storage class that uses ML to analyze object usage and determine the appropriate storage class. Data is moved to the most cost-effective access tier, without any performance impact or added overhead.
• S3 Standard-IA (Infrequent Access) is a type of storage class. Fast. Cheaper if you access files less than once a month. Additional retrieval fee is applied 50% less than Standard class.
• S3 One-Zone-IA is a type of storage class. Fast. Objects only exists in one AZ. Availability is 99.5% but cheaper than Standard IA by 20% less. Durability is reduced and data could get destroyed.
• S3 Glacier is a type of storage class. For long-term cold storage. Retrieval of data can take minutes to hours but the off is that it is a very cheap storage.
• S3 Glacier Deep Archive is a type of storage class. With the lowest cost storage class. Data retrieval time is 12 hours.
• AWS Outposts have their own storage.
• AWS Snow Family are storage and compute devices used to physically move data in or out the AWS cloud when moving data over the internet or private connection if it is too slow, difficult or costly.
• Types of AWS Snow Family:

  1. Snow Cone - 8TB HDD or 14 TB SSD
  2. Snowball Edge - 80TB Storage Optimized and 39.5 TB Compute Optimized.
  3. Snowmobile - 100PB of storage.
• Simple Storage Service (S3) is a serverless object storage service. You can upload very large files and an unlimited amount of files. You pay for what you store and don't worry about the underlying file-system, or upgrading the disk size.
• S3 Glacier is a cold storage service. It is designed as a low cost storage solution for archiving and long-term backup.
• Elastic Block Store (EBS) is a persistent block storage service. It is a virtual hard drive in the cloud you attach to EC2 instances. (ex. SSD, IOPS, Thoughput HHD, Cold HHD)
• Elastic File Storage (EFS) is a cloud-native NFS file system service. File storage you can mount to multiple EC2 Instances at the same time. When you need to share files between multiple servers.
• Storage Gateway is a hybrid cloud storage service that extends your on-premise storage to cloud.
• Types of storage gateway:

  1. File Gateway extends your local storage to AWS S3
  2. Volume Gateway caches your local drives to S3 so you have a continuous backup of local files in the cloud.
  3. Tape Gateway stores files onto virtual tapes for backing up your files on very cost effective long term storage.
• AWS Snow Family are storage devices used to physically migrate large amount of data to the cloud.
• Types of AWS Snow Family:

  1. Snowball Edge - are briefcase size data storage devices. 50-80TB
  2. SnowMobile - is a cargo container filled with racks of storage and compute that is transported via semi-trailer truck to transfer up to 100PB of data per trailer.
  3. Snowcone - a very small version of Snowball Edge that can transfer 8TB of data.
• AWS Backup a fully managed backup service that makes it easy to centralize and automate the backup of data across multiple AWS services (ex. Ec2, EB2, RDS, DynammoDB, EFS, Storage Gateway)
• CloudEndure Disaster Recovery continuously replicates your machines into a low-cost staging area in your target AWS account and preferred Region enabling fast and reliable recovery in case of IT data center failures.
• Amazon FSx is a feature rich and highly-performant file system. That can be used for Windows (SMB) or Linux (Lustre).
• Amazon FSx for Window File Server uses the 5MB protocol and allows you to mount FSx to Windows Servers.
• Amazon FSx for Lustre uses Linux's Lustre file system and allows you to mount FSx to Linux servers.
• Network File System (NFS) is a distributed file system protocol that lets users access files over a network similar to the way they access local storage.