This section provides valuable charts that can serve as a quick reference if you are tasked with choosing a storage system for a particular project or application.
The table will help you understand the main properties and use cases for each of the cloud storage products on AWS.
| If You Need: | Consider Using: |
|---|---|
| Persistent local storage for Amazon EC2, relational and NoSQL databases, data warehousing, enterprise applications, big data processing, or backup and recovery | Amazon EBS |
| A file system interface and file system access semantics to make data available to one or more Amazon EC2 instances for content serving, enterprise applications, media processing workflows, big data storage, or backup and recovery | Amazon EFS |
| A scalable, durable platform to make data accessible from any internet location for user-generated content, active archive, serveress computing, Big Data storage, or backup and recovery | Amazon S3 |
| Highly affordable, long-term storage that can replace tape for archive and regulatory compliance | Amazon S3 Glacier |
| A hybrid storage cloud augmenting your on-premises environment with AWS cloud storage for bursting, tiering, or migration | AWS Storage Gateway |
| A portfolio of services to help simplify and accelerate moving data of all types and sizes into and out of the AWS Cloud | AWS Cloud Data Migration Services |
The table shows a comparison of instance store, Amazon EBS, Amazon S3, and Amazon S3 Glacier.
Understanding table will help you make decisions about latency, size, durability, and cost during the exam.
| Instance Store | Amazon EBS | Amazon S3 | Amazon S3 Glacier | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Average latency | ms | ms, sec, min (~ size) | hrs | |
| Data volume | 4 GB to 48 TB | 1 GiB to 1 TiB | No limit | |
| Item size | Block storage | 5 TB max | 40 TB max | |
| Request rate | Very high | Low to very high (no limit) | Very low (no limit) | |
| Cost/GB per month | Amazon EC2 instance cost | ¢¢ | ¢ | |
| Cost/GB per month | Amazon EC2 instance cost | ¢¢ | ¢ | |
| Durability | Low | High | Very high | Very high |
| Temperature | Hot | Cold |
Before considering Amazon EC2 instance store as a storage option, make sure that your data does not meet any of these criteria:
If your data meets any of the previous four criteria, use an Amazon EBS volume. Otherwise, compare instance store and Amazon EBS for storage.
Because instance store is directly attached to the host computer, it will have lower latency than an Amazon EBS volume attached to the Amazon EC2 instance. Instance store is provided at no additional cost beyond the price of the Amazon EC2 instance you choose (if the instance has instance store[s] available), whereas Amazon EBS volumes incur an additional cost.
The table is a useful in helping you to compare performance and storage characteristics for Amazon’s highest-performing file, object, and block cloud storage offerings. This comparison will also be helpful when choosing the right data store for the applications that you are developing. It is also important for the exam.
| File Amazon EFS | Object Amazon S3 | Block Amazon EBS | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Performance | Per-operation latency | Low, consistent | Low, for mixed request types, and integration with CloudFront | Low, consistent |
| Throughput scale | Multiple GB per second | Low, consistent | ||
| Characteristics | Data Availability/Durability | Stored redundantly across multiple Availability Zones | Stored redundantly in a single Availability Zone | |
| Access | Web serving and content management, enterprise applications, media and entertainment, home directories, database backups, developer tools, container storage, Big Data analytics | Web serving and content management, media and entertainment, backups, Big Data analytics, data lake | Boot volumes, transactional and NoSQL databases, data warehousing, ETL | |