Storage
Cloud storage is a critical component of cloud computing, holding the information used by your workload. Cloud storage is typically more reliable, scalable, and secure than traditional on-premises storage systems. Select from object, block, and file storage services, and cloud data migration options for your workload.
In AWS, storage is available in three forms: object, block, and file:
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Object Storage provides a scalable, durable platform to make data accessible from any internet location for user-generated content, active archive, serverless computing, Big Data storage or backup and recovery. Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance. Amazon S3 is designed for 99.999999999% (11 9's) of durability, and stores data for millions of applications for companies all around the world.
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Block Storage provides highly available, consistent, low-latency block storage for each virtual host and is analogous to direct-attached storage (DAS) or a Storage Area Network (SAN). Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) is designed for workloads that require persistent storage accessible by EC2 instances that helps you tune applications with the right storage capacity, performance and cost.
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File Storage provides access to a shared file system across multiple systems. File storage solutions like Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) are ideal for use cases such as large content repositories, development environments, media stores, or user home directories. Amazon FSx makes it efficient and cost effective to launch and run popular file systems so you can leverage the rich feature sets and fast performance of widely used open source and commercially-licensed file systems.
The following question focuses on these considerations for performance efficiency.
| PERF 3: How do you select your storage solution? |
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| The more efficient storage solution for a system varies based on the kind of access operation (block, file, or object), patterns of access (random or sequential), required throughput, frequency of access (online, offline, archival), frequency of update (WORM, dynamic), and availability and durability constraints. Well-architected systems use multiple storage solutions and turn on different features to improve performance and use resources efficiently. |
When you select a storage solution, verifying that it aligns with your access patterns will be critical to achieving the performance you want.
