AWS Cloud Overview

In today’s world, where business growth is never constant, we need to manage the data expanding rapidly according to the requirements and accept these isolated patches of data from vast sources being used by a number of business professions and applications. Many of these businesses are not able to manage these overflowing pools and struggle with the complexity of these fragmented storage portfolios which slows down the applications and thus the innovation. AWS Cloud Object Storage comes into play here which provides massive scalability, cost-effective storage by breaking silos to store as any type of data in its own format. AWS is a centralized, easy-to-use application where one can manage all their storage in one place and can perform analysis, gain sights and make better decisions faster.

AWS cloud storage comes with five storage products mentioned in the list below:
1. Amazon Elastic Block Store(Amazon EBS)
2. Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS)
3. Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)
4. Amazon Glacier
5. AWS Storage Gateway

1. Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS)

Amazon EBS works as server disks, which have high persistence and performance in terms of reading and writing. First of all, you have to create the EBS volume with the required volume size and attach it to any of the desired EC2 machines. At a single time, you can only attach one Amazon EBS volume to your Amazon EC2 machine but you can switch with multiple volumes. For backup, you can create a snapshot of the volume and use this snapshot to create another volume with the help of a unique snapshot ID.

Amazon allows you to create the volume with a size of 1 GB to 16000 GB approx. Amazon EBS volumes come with five different types as mentioned below:

  • General Purpose SSD(GP2)
  • Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1)
  • Cold HDD (sc1)
  • Throughput Optimized HDD (st1)
  • Magnetic (standard)

You can choose one of the above Amazon EBS volume types according to your requirements. All of the above have different pricing.

2. Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS)

Amazon EFS provides the file storage environment in the AWS cloud. Amazon EFS helps you to create one or more than one file system where you mount your Amazon File System to your EC2 machine. You can even mount it to your VPC to share it with your network. You will need to use Network File System versions 4.0 and 4.1 (NFSv4) protocol in order to write the file to and read the file from your Amazon EFS system.

3. Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)

S3(Simple Storage Service) bucket is a public cloud storage system of Amazon Web Service. It is used to store folder and files with their metadata. We can use it for storing personal files or to store files for an application. It provides storage space based on the tier a customer has. It also provides an ACL(Access Control System). With the help of ACL, the user can set special permissions on the files and folders. AWS provides SDK(Software Development Kit) for many languages like Java, Python and many more so that developers can use S3 bucket in their application. A customer can interact with it using the AWS management console and using AWS CLI(Command Line Interface).

4. Amazon Glacier

Amazon Glacier is a cloud-based storage service for data archiving and long-term backups. Amazon Glacier allows the customers to store their data like photos, videos, and documents in the form of compressed files and these archived files are stored in a container called “Vault”. Every Archive has its own unique ID so customers can identify them easily. Customers can easily view their vaults list through AWS Management Console and can perform the vault operations like create vault, delete vault, lock vault, list vault metadata and retrieve vault with the help of AWS SDKs. You can store up to 1000 Vaults under a single account and manage permissions for any user account on any specific vault. Amazon Glacier comes with three retrieval features with varying costs. Retrieval features are Expedited, Standard, and Bulk retrievals.

5. AWS Storage Gateway

The AWS Storage Gateway is a storage service that provides storage in on-premises environments and the AWS cloud. It provides the low-latency performance by caching frequently accessed data on-premises while storing data securely and durably in Amazon Cloud storage services. It brings the security, manageability, durability, and scalability of AWS to the existing enterprise environment through native integration with AWS encryption, identity management, monitoring, and storage services.

Features:

  • The File Gateway enables you to store and retrieve an object in Amazon S3 using file protocols, such as NFS.
  • The Volume Gateway provides block storage to your application as local iSCSI disk volume that can be tiered into Amazon S3.
  • Tape gateway provides your backup application an iSCSI virtual tape library (VTL) interface, consisting of a virtual media changer, virtual tape driver, and virtual tape. Virtual tape data is stored in Amazon S3 or can be archived to Amazon Glacier.