AWS Classroom Series – 11/Nov/2021

Storage on AWS

• The storage offerings on AWS can be divided into 3 categories
  • Object Storage:
    • An object is piece of data like a document, image or video is stored with some metadata in a flat structure.
    • It provides that data to applications over API over the internet.
    • It is simple to build anything on top of an object storage
    • For example, you can easily develop web application on top of AWS S3 (Simple Storage Service) that delivers content to user by making API calls over the internet
  • Block Storage:
    • In block storage, data is presented to your instance as a disk volume.
    • It provides a low, single-digit-latency access to AWS EC2 instances.
    • Elastic Block Store (EBS) and Instance Store are two block storages offered by AWS
  • File Storage
    • In file storage, data is presented via file system interface and with file system semantics to instances.
    • Elastic File System (EFS) and FSx are two AWS service that provide file storage

AWS Simple Storage Service (S3)

• The capacity of S3 is unlimited and data can be stored in any AWS Region.
• It is fundamentally different from other file repositories because it doesn’t have a file system.
• All the objects are stored in a flat namespace organized by buckets
• Lets create an S3 bucket and upload some content and access it over the internet
• Copy the url of any object and access using any browser
• S3 is highly durable and has 99.99999999999% durability which means if you store 10,000 objects with Amazon S3, you can on average expect to incur a loss of single objects once every 10,000,000 years
• S3 pricing depends on two factors
  • Storage cost
  • access cost
• S3 Bucket is collection of folders and objects. Folder can contain other folders and objects
• To access S3 object we would have URL. The url of the S3 bucket contains the bucket name. Since Bucket names are part of url, no two aws buckets across all accounts of AWS cannot have a same name.
• We need to understand on how to save costs depending on storage cost to be less or access cost to be less.