AWS Storage types
- Amazon EBS
Elastic Block Storage provides virtual “Disks” for your EC2 instances. Think of EBS as raw, unformatted disks. They are formatted with a file system, such as NTFS or Ext4 by the instance. Multiple EBS devices can be supported on the same EC2 instance, just like multiple disks on a VM.
- Amazon EC2 Instance Store
An EC2 instance store is temporary storage on disks that are physically attached to the host computer. There are many use cases for this storage type, such as temporary content or data that is replicated across many instances. The data is discarded when the associated EC2 instance stops or is terminated. This storage is not meant for valuable, long-term data. You can back this data up periodically to S3 or EBS. SSD instance stores can be used when you need high performance and low latency, but do not need data to persist when the instance is terminated.
- Glacier
Think of Amazon Glacier as a archiving service in the cloud. It provides a secure, durable, and extremely low-cost cloud storage service.
It can take up anywhere from a matter of minutes, or as long as to four hours to access anything in glacier, so it is largely for offline storage. The time it takes depends of the service level you subscribe to. This is suitable for long-term archiving and backups.Data can be stored at a very low cost, ranging as low as .4 cents per gigabyte per month.
- S3 (simple storage service)
Think of S3 as simply a place to store your files. It is an object based storage solution that is secure and highly scalable. And you only pay for what you use.
S3 is extremely durable – as a matter of fact it is designed to deliver 99.999999999%, or 11 9’s durability.S3 is commonly used to store data for analytics, backups, and disaster recovery. Amazon provides easy to use cloud data migration options to upload data to S3.
- EFS
Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) is like a NAS device in the cloud. It is block level storage. You can mount EFS to Amazon EC2 instances using NFS 4.1. This is a commonly used standard that allows the operating system to mount EFS storage directly.
Multiple EC2 instances can access the same EFS file system, allowing you to share storage across multiple virtual servers. This can even work on VMs that are in different availability zones.
You can also mount your Amazon EFS file systems to your own physical datacenter servers. This requires AWS Direct Connect.
- Amazon Storage Gateway
The AWS Storage Gateway service can be used to integrate on-premise storage with AWS. This is useful when you need the performance of local storage with the scale of AWS. This is useful in a hybrid cloud architecture, when some of your workloads are running on premise, and some in the cloud.
With the Storage Gateway your data can be on-premise, but also take advantage of all of the great storage services of AWS. Key data is cached locally, providing higher performance. All data transferred between the local site and AWS is compressed and encrypted.
source: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/quick-summary-aws-storage-types-rick-crisci/