General cost order (lowest to highest):
✅ S3 < EBS < EFS
Breakdown
- Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
- Cheapest general-purpose storage.
- Designed for object storage (photos, videos, backups, static files).
- Pricing (approx, varies by region): $0.023/GB-month for S3 Standard.
- Even cheaper tiers: S3 Infrequent Access, Glacier, Glacier Deep Archive.
- Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store)
- Mid-cost option.
- Designed for block storage attached to EC2 (like virtual hard drives).
- Pricing (General Purpose SSD gp3): around $0.08/GB-month.
- Higher IOPS or throughput → costs more.
- Amazon EFS (Elastic File System)
- Most expensive.
- Designed for managed NFS file storage (POSIX-compliant shared filesystem).
- Scales automatically but costs around $0.30/GB-month (Standard).
- Cheaper tier: EFS Infrequent Access (~$0.025/GB-month), but still more expensive when frequently accessed compared to S3 or EBS.
Why this order?
- S3 → Lowest cost, but limited to object storage access (not block/file).
- EBS → Higher cost, provides low-latency block-level access to EC2.
- EFS → Highest cost, fully managed shared NFS, elasticity and concurrency, priced for convenience and scalability.
👉 So the correct cost ranking is:
S3 < EBS < EFS
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