What Storage Options Does AWS Offer?
Understand the key AWS storage services such as Elastic Block Store, Elastic File System, and Amazon S3. Explore the differences between block, file, and object storage types and their best uses, helping you make informed decisions about scalable cloud storage solutions.
We'll cover the following...
We’ll talk about the following storage options in this lesson:
- Block storage: Elastic Block Store (EBS) and EC2 Instance Store
- File storage: Amazon EFS
- Object storage: Amazon S3
Difference between block, file, and object storage
Before we go into AWS offerings in detail, let’s clarify what the different storage types are.
Block storage
Block storage is the closest logical representation of physical storage hardware, and it addresses data in blocks. The physical device has some means of retrieving data based on the number of the block in which it’s stored. Usually, blocks are sized between 512 B (512 bytes) to 4 KB (4 kilobytes) for modern hard disks and solid-state drives (SSDs).
This also means that the unit is a block. If we want to store something smaller, we will waste the leftover space of this block. If we want to store something bigger, we need to use multiple blocks and somehow remember which blocks we used.
The maximum amount of data we can store is limited by the physical size of the ...