Cloud-based storage is a critical component of any enterprise IT infrastructure. It’s what allows your organization to share data across the business and enables seamless access to files from any device, anywhere in the world. As such, it’s important that organizations understand how cloud storage works and how they can leverage this technology to help them achieve their business goals. 

Key components of AWS storage 

The four main components of AWS storage are Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), Amazon Elastic File System (EFS), Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), and Amazon Glacier. 

Amazon EBS

Amazon EBS is a block-based storage service that provides you with persistent virtual disks that can be attached to your EC2 instances. You can use these virtual disks as if they were physical hard drives or solid-state drives (SSDs). It also supports snapshots for point-in-time backups so that if something goes wrong with your server, you can restore it back to its previous state quickly and easily. 

Amazon EFS

Amazon EFS offers file system abstraction over multiple EC2 instances in the same region without requiring any additional hardware or software installations on those instances themselves. This enables high availability by replicating data across multiple servers automatically using built-in replication within S3 itself rather than relying upon third-party solutions like DRBD/Heartbeat etc.; this reduces costs since there’s no need for an expensive DR solution.  

Amazon S3

Amazon S3 is a cloud storage platform that provides you with object-based storage. It enables you to store any amount of data and access it from anywhere in the world. Amazon S3 is a highly durable, secure, and scalable object storage service that provides 99.999999999% durability for objects over a given year. 99.99% availability of objects over a given year, means your data will be accessible to you almost all the time (more than 9 hours per day). 

Amazon Glacier

Amazon Glacier is a low-cost cloud storage service for long-term retention, backup, and archiving. It offers secure, reliable, and durable storage for less frequently accessed data. Amazon Glacier provides you with object-based storage that enables you to store any amount of data and access it from anywhere in the world. Amazon S3 is a cloud storage platform that provides you with object-based storage. 

Optimizing costs with EBS, EFS, and S3 

There are many options available to you when it comes to AWS storage, and they all have their pros and cons. Generally speaking, there are two types of file systems you can use: EBS and S3. 

EBS is an instance-level I/O (input/output) volume that provides persistent block-level storage for your EC2 instances. You can attach multiple EBS volumes to a single instance at the same time, but each one must be formatted with either ext4 or XFS (for Linux instances). By contrast, S3 offers object storage where objects are stored as files inside buckets–and there’s no limit on how many objects you can store or how large they may be. 

EFS stands for Elastic File System and provides shared file system access over the internet from anywhere with an internet connection–without having any hardware requirements at all!  

Ensuring high availability with cloud storage 

When you’re building your cloud storage strategy, it’s important to consider how you can ensure the highest levels of availability and scale. 

You can do this by: 

• Using multiple availability zones: Each AWS region has at least two distinct data centers that are physically separated from each other, so even if one goes down, there will still be infrastructure in place to keep your applications running. 
• Replicating your data across multiple regions for redundancy or disaster recovery (DR): For example, if an earthquake hits Northern California and takes out all of its infrastructure (which sadly happened in 1989), then having some of your backups stored in another part of the country means that they won’t be affected by this event–and therefore won’t need to be rebuilt from scratch! This is known as multi-region replication. 
• Encrypting at rest using S3 Server-Side Encryption with Key Management Interface (SSE-KMS), which allow customers who encrypt their objects with SSE-KMS keys before uploading them into Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets or Glacier vaults to specify whether they want those objects encrypted with customer supplied keys or AWS managed ones.” 

There are many options available to build a resilient, high-performance, and cost-optimized storage strategy on AWS. 

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS): This is a block-level storage device that provides persistent volumes for use with EC2 instances. EBS volumes can be created in multiple sizes, ranging from 1GB to 16TB, and are attached to an instance at boot time. The main advantage of using EBS is that it allows you to take advantage of all the features offered by EC2 such as snapshots, cloning, etc. 

You can also read about these services in detail in this whitepaper to help you get a more thorough understanding. Moreover, if you want to tread carefree in the field of cloud storage it is always helpful to let the experts take over for you. Aspire Systems is your one stop destination in those scenarios.  

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