Storage for Developers

Module Objectives

By the end of this module, learners will be able to:

• Understand AWS storage services from a developer perspective
• Select the right storage option for different application patterns
• Use Amazon S3 programmatically and securely
• Configure EBS and EFS for compute workloads
• Apply IAM permissions and encryption
• Handle durability, availability, and cost

1. Overview of AWS Storage Options

Why Multiple Storage Services?

Different applications need:

• Object vs file vs block storage
• High durability vs low latency
• Shared vs single-instance access

Storage Type Service
Object Amazon S3
Block Amazon EBS
File Amazon EFS
Hybrid / Transfer DataSync, Storage Gateway (brief mention)

2. Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)

What is Amazon S3?

• Object storage
• Virtually unlimited scale
• 11 9’s durability

Core S3 Concepts

• Bucket
• Object
• Key
• Region-scoped buckets
• Global namespace

S3 Storage Classes
Class Use Case
Standard Frequent access
IA Infrequent access
One Zone-IA Non-critical data
Glacier Instant Archive, quick access
Glacier Flexible Archive
Glacier Deep Archive Lowest cost

🔑 Storage class affects cost, not durability.

1. S3 Security & Access Control Access Mechanisms

• IAM policies
• Bucket policies
• ACLs (legacy, discouraged)

Encryption Options

• SSE-S3
• SSE-KMS
• Client-side encryption

Public Access

• Block Public Access (default ON)
• Bucket policy controls

4. Hands-On Lab 1: S3 for Developers

Objective
Create a secure S3 bucket and access it programmatically.

Steps

Create S3 bucket

Enable:

Versioning

Default encryption

Upload sample object

Attach IAM role/policy:

{
"Effect": "Allow",
"Action": ["s3:GetObject", "s3:PutObject"],
"Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::my-dev-bucket/*"
}

Access bucket via AWS CLI or SDK

Validation

Upload and download objects

Access denied without permissions

5. S3 for Application Patterns

Common Developer Use Cases

• Static website hosting
• Application artifacts
• Logs and backups
• Data lake

Event-Driven Patterns

• S3 → Lambda trigger
• S3 → EventBridge

6. Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store)

What is EBS?

• Block storage for EC2
• Attached to one instance at a time
• Key EBS Concepts
• Volume
• Snapshot
• Availability Zone scoped

Use Cases

• Databases on EC2
• Boot volumes
• Low-latency workloads

1. Hands-On Lab 2: EBS Volume with EC2 Objective

Attach and mount EBS volume to EC2.

Steps:

8. Amazon EFS (Elastic File System)

What is EFS?

• Managed NFS file system
• Shared across multiple EC2 instances
• Automatically scales

Key Characteristics

• Multi-AZ
• POSIX-compliant
• Regional service

Use Cases

• Shared application data
• Content management systems
• Microservices shared storage

🔑 EFS supports concurrent access from multiple EC2s.

9. Cost & Performance Considerations

Cost Drivers

• Storage amount
• Access frequency
• Data transfer
• API requests (S3)

Performance Factors

• S3 prefix distribution
• EBS volume type
• EFS throughput mode

1. Use S3 for pre-signed url uploads

2. Track multi-part uploads