The hosting strategy you choose plays an important role in the performance you get and the cost you will spend. To achieve maximum efficiency, you must match your system’s computing, application, and processing needs with the appropriate storage technology. But which option is right for you?
To answer this question, we will explore the difference between Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and understand the benefits. and the specific usage of each solution. This will make it easy for you to choose the best solution to support your business goals and hosting needs.
What is the difference between Amazon EBS Vs EFS Vs S3?
Amazon EFS, Amazon EBS, and Amazon S3 are three different types of AWS storage that can be applied to different types of workload needs. Let’s take a closer look at the main features of each option, as well as the similarities and differences.
Amazon EBS provides high availability block-level storage for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances.
It stores data on the file system which is retained after the EC2 version is turned off.
Amazon EFS offers scalable file storage, optimized for EC2 as well as EBS.
It can be used as a common data source for any application or workload running on multiple instances.
Using the EFS file system, you can configure instances to mount the file system.
The main difference between EBS and EFS is that EBS is only accessible from a single EC2 instance in your particular AWS region, while EFS allows you to mount file systems across multiple regions. and instances.
Ultimately, Amazon S3 is a very efficient object repository for storing large numbers of user backups or files.
Unlike EBS or EFS, S3 is not limited to EC2. Files are stored in the S3 bucket that can be accessed with code or directly from services like AWS CloudFront. This is why many websites use it to store their content and media files, which can be effectively leveraged from AWS CloudFront.
So how can you choose between Amazon EBS vs EFS and S3? That depends on the benefits you are looking for and the use case for your workload. Let’s take a closer look at each to understand their benefits and use cases.
Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS)
Use Amazon EBS to provide storage space for your virtual machine’s drives.
It stores data in blocks of equal size and organizes them into a hierarchy similar to a traditional filesystem.
The drives are of predetermined size and are attached to EC2 instances in the same way as the drives on the physical machine.
Here are the benefits and use cases of EBS:
Benefits of Amazon EBS
- Optimized performance: Increase throughput by leveraging network capacity and minimizing network connectivity between instances and EBS.
- Low Latency Performance: Utilizing an EBS SSD, it provides reliable I / O performance that can be extended to meet your workload needs.
- Secure storage and high availability: EBS drives provide redundancy in Availability Zones while access control and encryption enhance security.
- Interchangeability: With EBS, you can replicate snapshots across AWS regions and place resources and data in multiple locations. This makes data recovery, data center migration, and geographic scaling simple.
- Backup and restore data is easy: snapshots over time protect data.
- Quickly scale up or down: EBS can quickly scale volumes, ensuring you get the right performance and capacity for changing computing needs.
Amazon EBS use cases
- Test and development: You can scale, store, clone, or provision your test, dev, or production environment.
- NoSQL databases: EBS provides NoSQL databases with the low latency performance and reliability they need for top performance.
- Relational databases: EBS scales to accommodate your changing storage needs. This makes it a great choice for database deployments, including PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle, or Microsoft SQL Server.
- Business Consistency: Replication EBS Snapshots and Amazon Machine Images (AMI) to run applications in different AWS regions. This reduces data loss and speeds up recovery time by backing up log files and data regularly, across geographic areas.
- Enterprise scale applications: It can meet a variety of enterprise computing needs through powerful block storage that can support your most important applications, such as Microsoft Exchange, Oracle, or Microsoft SharePoint.
Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS)
EFS is the best choice for running any high-workload application that requires scalable storage, and must produce fast output. It automatically scales, even when the most sudden workload is met.
After the bulk storage needs time out, EFS will automatically scale down.
EFS can be attached to different AWS services and accessed from all of your virtual machines.
Use it to run shared data or to analyze big data. You will pay for the memory you actually use, instead of the predefined memory that will end up being wasted.
Benefits of Amazon EFS
- Scalable performance to support any workload: EFS provides needed throughput variability workloads. It can deliver higher throughput at a rate consistent with the file system’s sudden growth, even for workloads up to 500,000 IOPS or 10 GB per second.
- Elasticity: Automatically increase or decrease your file system memory. Deleting or adding files never affects the apps. After creating the EFS file system, you can add files without worrying about memory provision.
- Access to stored files: Physical server and EC2 instances can access the shared file system at the same time. EC2 versions can also access the EFS file systems located in other AWS regions through VPC peering .
- Fully Managed Services: EFS is a fully managed service, which means your company will never have to patch, deploy, or maintain your file system.
- Cost savings: You only need to pay for the exact amount of storage you used, as there are no upfront offers, upfront fees or commitments. Plus, you can use Lifecycle Management to convert unused files for a month to a more cost-effective type of storage, which can reduce costs by up to 85%.
- Security and stricter compliance: You can securely access the file system with your existing security solution or control access to the EFS file system using AWS Identity and Access Management ( IAM), Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) or POSIX rights. And, EFS can encrypt your data, whether it’s in transit or idle. This gives you reliable security and makes compliance easier.
Amazon EFS use cases
- Lift-and-shift application support: EFS is resilient, available, and extensible, and allows you to easily and quickly move business applications without the hassle of refactor them.
- Big Data Analysis: It is capable of running big data applications, low latency file access and read-after-write strategy.
- Content Management System and Web Server Support: EFS is a powerful throughput file system capable of allowing content management systems and web serving applications, such as archives, web sites, and web servers. web or blog.
- Application development and testing: Only EFS provides the file sharing system needed to share source code and files, across multiple computer resources to facilitate auto-scaling workloads.
Amazon S3
Amazon S3 provides object storage. Each object has its own unique ID or key, accessible through requests from any location. S3 also supports storing static web content that can be accessed from the S3 bucket or from the AWS CloudFront. And S3 is very secure, provided. “11 nines” – 99,999999999 data tolerance.
The benefits of Amazon S3
- Strong performance, scalability, and availability: It keeps your data safe from errors, failures, and threats, and delivers it when you need it.
- Cost-effective Storage Classes: Store data across S3 storage classes to save costs and maintain high levels of performance. Analyze Storage Class allows you to determine which data can be transferred to lower cost Storage Class. You can then perform the transfer using the S3 Lifecycle policy . Finally, S3’s intelligent tiering allows data to be stored with variable or unknown access types using hierarchical objects, helping to reduce storage costs.
- Easier audit, compliance, and security features: S3 can store data and protect it from unauthorized access with its powerful access management and encryption tools. S3 has features that make it easy for you to comply with regulatory requests, and Amazon Macie may deny requests to access your sensitive data anomaly. Plus, S3 works well with many of the AWS testing features.
- Precise data control: A variety of management tools allow you to categorize and report on data. S3 has storage class analysis that monitors access types, while S3 Lifecycle analysis converts the object to lower cost storage. S3 Object Lock specifies a retention date for objects to prevent deletion, and S3 Inventory provides visibility into the stored objects, as well as their encryption and metadata. Finally, S3 Batch Operations can run storage management maintenance for billions of objects while AWS Lambda can be used to automate workflows, identify alerts, and log operations without need to manage more infrastructure.
Amazon S3 use cases
- Data lake and big data analysis: Create a Data lake to keep the raw data in its original format, then use machine learning, querying, and analysis tools to extract insights. S3 works with AWS Lake Formation to create data lakes, and then define management, security, and audit policies. Together, they can be scaled to accommodate your growing data warehouses and you’ll never have to pay upfront.
- Backup and restore: Secure, robust backup and recovery solutions that are easy to build when you combine S3 with other AWS services, including EBS, EFS, or S3 Glacier. These services can help you meet your compliance, recovery time, and restore point goals.
- Reliable disaster recovery: S3 Storage, S3 Cross-Region Replication , and additional AWS database, computing, and network services make it easy to protect critical IT systems, data, and applications . It provides quick recovery from power failures, regardless of whether they are caused by a system failure, a natural disaster or a human error.
- Methodological Storage: S3 works seamlessly with other AWS services to provide methodical storage. S3 Glacier and S3 Glacier Deep Archive allow you to archive data and remove physical infrastructure. There are three S3 storage classes that you can use to retain objects for long periods of time at their lowest speed. S3 Lifecycle Policy can be created to store objects at any point in their lifecycle, or you can upload objects directly to storage classes. S3 Object Lock responds to compliance rules by applying retention date objects to avoid them being deleted. S3 Glacier can recover any archived objects within minutes.
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