AWS Storage - Difference between OBJECT STORAGE, BLOCK STORAGE and FILE STORAGE

Definition

These are the storage types provided by AWS services such as

S3 - Simple Storage Service for object storage
EBS - Elastic Block Store for Block storage
EFS - Elastic File Storage for object storage

OBJECT STORAGE (S3)

• S3 is for object storage. Eg.. Photos, videos, files, and simple web pages.
• Data storage for unstructured data.
• Can be accessed from multiple instances.
• Data is organized hierarchically.
• More comprehensive metadata labels makes querying easier.
• Great for Data lakes, archiving files for long-term, and hosting static web sites.
• Lower cost as compared to EFS and EBS.
• Highly available, Durable, and Flexible.

AWS S3 use cases:
1) Data lake and big data analytics.
2) Backup and restoration.
3) Reliable disaster recovery.
4) Methodical archiving.

BLOCK STORAGE (EBS)

• EC2 block storage. Eg.. computer’s hard drive
• System storage for Amazon EC2 VM's.
• Used as per-instance storage (EC2).
• Data is stored in equally-sized blocks.
• EBS encryption, High availability and easy backup.

AWS EBS use cases:
1) Testing and development.
2) NoSQL databases.
3) Relational databases.
4) Business consistency.
5) Enterprise-wide applications.

FILE STORAGE (EFS)

• Scalable data storage for Amazon EC2 VM's.
• EFS is a file system for many EC2 instances. Eg.. Multiple EC2 instances and lots of data.
• Can be mounted by multiple instances.
• Highly scalable — Can grow or shrink as per demand.
• Fully elastic — No need to provision new infrastructure.
• Can cross AWS region boundary using VPC peering.

EFS use cases:
1)Lift-and-shift application support.
2) Analytics for big data.
3) Content management system and web server support.
4) Application development and testing.