Chapter Two
Storage
Object, block, and file storage are three different models, not three flavors of the same thing. Choosing the wrong one is one of the most common and most expensive AWS mistakes.
Core Terminology
A few terms recur across this chapter. Defining them here keeps the service sections focused.
Durability
The probability data survives over time. S3 Standard is designed for eleven nines (99.999999999%) — losing an object is statistically negligible.
Availability
The probability data is reachable right now. Distinct from durability: data can be safe but temporarily unreachable.
Object vs Block vs File
Object (S3) is key-and-blob over HTTP; block (EBS) is a raw disk for one instance; file (EFS/FSx) is a shared file system many hosts mount.
Storage Class
A pricing-and-access tier within S3 — Standard, Infrequent Access, Glacier — trading retrieval speed and cost.
Snapshot
A point-in-time, incremental copy of an EBS volume stored in S3, used for backup and cloning.
IOPS / Throughput
Two distinct performance dimensions: operations per second versus megabytes per second. Different workloads bottleneck on different ones.
Services in This Chapter
Service 09
Amazon S3
Object storage for the internet — eleven nines of durability, effectively unlimited capacity, and the default home for everything from static assets to data lakes.
Service 10
Amazon EBS
Block storage volumes for EC2. Network-attached disks that persist independently of the instance — the boot and data disks of the VM world.
Service 11
Amazon EFS
Managed NFS file storage. A shared POSIX file system many instances mount at once, scaling elastically with no capacity planning.
Service 12
Amazon FSx
Managed file systems for specific engines — Windows File Server, Lustre, NetApp ONTAP, OpenZFS. The choice when you need a particular protocol or feature set.
Service 13
Amazon S3 Glacier
Archival object storage at a fraction of S3 Standard's price, traded for retrieval latency of minutes to hours. For data you must keep but rarely read.
Service 14
AWS Storage Gateway
A hybrid bridge that presents AWS storage to on-prem applications as local file, volume, or tape interfaces. The migration and backup on-ramp.
Service 15
AWS Backup
Centralized, policy-driven backup across AWS services. One place to define retention and schedules instead of per-service snapshot scripts.