AWS Storage

Cloud storage is a cloud computing model that stores data on the Internet through a cloud computing
provider who manages and operates data storage as a service. It’s delivered on demand with just-in-
time capacity and costs and eliminates buying and managing your own data storage infrastructure. This
gives you agility, global scale and durability, with “anytime, anywhere” data access.
Cloud Storage Requirements:
 Durability. Data should be redundantly stored, ideally across multiple facilities and multiple devices in
each facility. Natural disasters, human error, or mechanical faults should not result in data loss.
 Availability. All data should be available when needed, but there is a difference between production
data and archives. The ideal cloud storage will deliver the right balance of retrieval times and cost.
 Security. All data is ideally encrypted, both at rest and in transit. Permissions and access controls
should work just as well in the cloud as they do for on premises storage.
Types of Cloud Storage: There are three types of cloud data storage:
 Block storage: It is a technology that is used to store data files on Storage Area Networks (SANs) or
cloud-based storage environments. Block storage breaks up data into blocks and then stores those
blocks as separate pieces, each with a unique identifier. Block storage is when a raw volume of data
storage is presented to a server and each volume block can function as an individual hard drive or
storage repository. In block storage, metadata is limited to basic file attributes. Block storage is best
suited for static files that aren’t changed often because any change made to a file results in the creation
of a new object.
Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS): It provides persistent block storage volumes for use with Amazon EC2
instances in the AWS Cloud.
EBS volumes come in all different sizes and types. It can be used as the primary storage for file systems,
databases, or for any applications that require fine granular updates and access to raw, unformatted,
block-level storage or for both database-style applications (random reads and writes), and to
throughput-intensive applications (long, continuous reads and writes).
To create an EBS volume, you define the configuration (such as volume size and type) and provision it.
After you create an EBS volume, it can attach to an Amazon EC2 instance.,
Termination protection is turned off by default and must be manually enabled (keeps the volume/data
when the instance is terminated).
EBS currently supports a maximum volume size of 16 TiB.
Two partitioning schemes commonly used on Linux and Windows systems: master boot record (MBR)
and GUID partition table (GPT).
An EBS volume being modified goes through a sequence of states. The volume enters first the Modifying
state, then the Optimizing state, and finally the Complete state.
Different types of Storage options: General Purpose SSD (gp2, gp3), Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1, io2),
Throughput Optimized HDD (st1). Multiple volumes can be mounted on the same instance. Provisioned
IOPS volume can be mounted to multiple instances at a time using Amazon EBS Multi-Attach.
You can have up to 5,000 EBS volumes and up to 10,000 snapshots by default.
AWS Free Tier includes 30GB of Storage, 2 million I/Os, and 1GB of snapshot storage with Amazon EBS.
File system can be created on top of these volumes or use them in any other way you would use a block
device.
EBS volumes are replicated within an Availability Zone (AZ) and can easily scale to petabytes of data. To
attach an Amazon EC2 instance to an EBS volume, both the Amazon EC2 instances and the EBS volume
must reside within the same Availability Zone.
To make a volume available outside of the AZ, create a snapshot and restore that snapshot to a new
volume anywhere in that region.
If an EBS volume is the root device of an instance, you must stop the instance before you can detach the
volume.
EBS volumes support encryption of data at rest, data in transit, and all volume backups. EBS encryption
is supported by all volume types, includes built-in key management infrastructure, and has zero impact
on performance.
You are charged by the amount you provision in GB per month until you release the storage. After you
detach a volume, you are still charged for volume storage as long as the storage amount exceeds the
limit of the AWS Free Tier. You must delete a volume to avoid incurring further charges.
Amazon EBS Snapshots: Amazon EBS Snapshots provide a simple and secure data protection solution
that is designed to protect your block storage data such as EBS volumes, boot volumes, as well as on-
premises block data.
It back up the data on your EBS volumes to S3 by taking point-in-time snapshots.
Snapshots are incremental backups, which means that only the blocks on the device that have changed
after your most recent snapshot are saved. This minimizes the time required to create the snapshot and
saves on storage costs by not duplicating data.
When you delete a snapshot, only the data unique to that snapshot is removed.
It can be used to enable disaster recovery, migrate data across regions and accounts, and improve
backup compliance.
Amazon EBS Snapshots are billed only for the changed blocks stored.
The snapshots are automatically saved to Amazon S3 for long-term retention.
S3 is designed for 99.99999999% (11 9’s) durability, ensuring higher availability of your EBS Snapshots.
Volumes restored from encrypted snapshots are automatically encrypted.
A snapshot is constrained to the Region where it was created. To share a snapshot with another Region,
copy the snapshot to that Region.
You can’t delete a snapshot of the root device of an EBS volume used by a registered AMI.
Each account can have up to 5 concurrent snapshot copy requests to a single destination Region.
User-defined tags are not copied from the source snapshot to the new snapshot.
EBS Fast Snapshots: EBS fast snapshot restore allows you to create a volume from a snapshot that is
fully initialized. This removes the latency of I/O operations on the block when accessed for the first time.
AWS Backup: It is an automated and centralized backup service, to protect EBS volumes and other AWS
resources. AWS Backup is integrated with Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon EBS, Amazon RDS, Amazon EFS,
and AWS Storage Gateway to give you a fully managed AWS backup solution. With AWS Backup, you can
configure backups for EBS volumes, automate backup scheduling, set retention policies, and monitor
backup and restore activity.
Instance Store: Amazon EC2 instance store volumes (also called ephemeral drives) provide temporary
block-level storage for many EC2 instance types. This storage consists of a preconfigured and pre-
attached block of disk storage on the same physical server that hosts the EC2 instance for which the
block provides storage. The amount of the disk storage provided varies by EC2 instance type, and you
can write to it just like a normal hard drive. Since this volume is attached to the underlying physical host,
if you stop or terminate your EC2 instance, all data written to the instance store volume will be deleted.
The reason for this, is that if you start your instance from a stop state, it's likely that EC2 instance will
start up on another host. A host where that volume does not exist. Remember EC2 instances are virtual
machines, and therefore the underlying host can change between stopping and starting an instance. 
Because of this ephemeral or temporary nature of instance store volumes, they are useful in situations
where you can lose the data being written to the drive. Such as temporary files, scratch data, and data
that can be easily recreated without consequence. Amazon EC2 local instance store volumes are not
intended to be used as durable disk storage, means that data on instance store volumes is persistent
across orderly instance reboots, but if the EC2 instance is stopped and restarted, terminates, or fails, all
data on the instance store volumes is lost. You should not use local instance store volumes for any data
that must persist over time, such as permanent file or database storage, without providing data
persistence by replicating data or periodically copying data to durable storage such as Amazon EBS or
Amazon S3. The number and storage capacity of Amazon EC2 local instance store volumes are fixed and
defined by the instance type. Although you can’t increase or decrease the number of instance store
volumes on a single EC2 instance, this storage is still scalable and elastic; you can scale the total amount
of instance store up or down by increasing or decreasing the number of running EC2 instances. Although
there is no additional charge for data storage on local instance store volumes, note that data transferred
to and from Amazon EC2 instance store volumes from other Availability Zones or outside of an Amazon
EC2 Region can incur data transfer charges.

 Object storage: It breaks data files up into pieces called objects. It then stores those objects in a single
repository, which can be spread out across multiple networked systems. In object storage, each object
consists of data, metadata, and a key. The data might be an image, video, text document, or any other
type of file. Metadata contains information about what the data is, how it is used, the object size, and so
on. An object’s key is its unique identifier. It is ideal for building modern applications from scratch that
require scale and flexibility and can also be used to import existing data stores for analytics, backup, or
archive. When a file in object storage is modified, the entire object is updated.
Amazon Simple Storage Service: Amazon S3 is a data store that allows to store and retrieve an
unlimited amount of data at any scale. Data is stored as objects in buckets. Bucket names must be
unique across all of AWS. Bucket names must be between 3-63 characters in length. The maximum
object size that can be uploaded is five terabytes. Objects can also be versioned to protect them from
accidental deletion of an object. It means that you always retain the previous versions of an object.
Multiple buckets can be created and store across different classes or tiers of data. These tiers offer
mechanisms for different storage use cases such as data that needs to be accessed frequently, versus
audit data that needs to be retained for There are three types of Access Tiers:
1.S3 Standard: It has 11 nines of durability. It is designed for frequently accessed data and stores data in
a minimum of three Availability Zones. S3 Standard provides high availability for objects. This makes it a
good choice for a wide range of use cases, such as websites, content distribution, and data analytics. S3
Standard has a higher cost.
2.S3 Infrequent Access: S3-IA is used for data that is accessed less frequently but requires rapid access
when needed. It has a lower storage price and higher retrieval price. It is used to store backups, disaster
recovery files, or any object that requires a long-term storage. It stores data in a minimum of three
Availability Zones.
3.S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access: S3 One Zone-IA stores data in a single Availability Zone. It has lower
storage price than S3 Standard-IA. This makes it a good storage class to consider if the following
conditions apply:
i. You want to save costs on storage.
ii. You can easily reproduce your data in the event of an Availability Zone failure.
These two storage classes are suitable for objects larger than 128 KB that you plan to store for at least
30 days. If an object is less than 128 KB, Amazon S3 charges you for 128 KB. If you delete an object
before the 30-day minimum, you are charged for 30 days.
4.S3 Intelligent-Tiering: It is Ideal for data with unknown or changing access patterns. It requires a small
monthly monitoring and automation fee per object. In the S3 Intelligent-Tiering storage class, Amazon
S3 monitors objects’ access patterns. If you haven’t accessed an object for 30 consecutive days, Amazon
S3 automatically moves it to the infrequent access tier, S3 Standard-IA. If you access an object in the
infrequent access tier, Amazon S3 automatically moves it to the frequent access tier, S3 Standard.
5.S3 Glacier: It is a low-cost storage designed for data archiving and able to retrieve objects within a few
minutes to hours, S3 Glacier is a low-cost storage class that is ideal for data archiving.
6.S3 Glacier Deep Archive: Lowest-cost object storage class ideal for archiving, Able to retrieve objects
within 12 hours.
You cannot specify GLACIER as the storage class at the time that you create an object. Glacier objects
are visible through S3 only. When deciding between Amazon S3 Glacier and Amazon S3 Glacier Deep
Archive, consider how quickly you need to retrieve archived objects. You can retrieve objects stored in
the S3 Glacier storage class within a few minutes to a few hours. By comparison, you can retrieve
objects stored in the S3 Glacier Deep Archive storage class within 12 hours.
You are charged per GB per month of storage and are charged for retrieval operations such as retrieve
requests and amount of data retrieved depending on the data access tier – Expedited, Standard, or Bulk.
Upload requests are charged. You are charged for data transferred out of Glacier. Pricing for Glacier
Select is based upon the total amount of data scanned, the amount of data returned, and the number of
requests initiated. There is a charge if you delete data within 90 days.
There are three options for retrieval, which range from minutes to hours:
1.Expedited: It allows you to quickly access your data when occasional urgent requests for a subset of
archives are required. For all but the largest archived objects, data accessed are typically made available
within 1–5 minutes. There are two types of Expedited retrievals:
i. On-Demand requests are similar to EC2 On-Demand instances and are available most of the
time.
ii. Provisioned requests are guaranteed to be available when you need them.
2.Standard requests allow you to access any of your archived objects within several hours. Standard
retrievals typically complete within 3–5 hours. This is the default option for retrieval requests that do
not specify the retrieval option.
3.Bulk: Glacier’s lowest-cost retrieval option, enabling you to retrieve large amounts, even petabytes, of
data inexpensively in a day. Bulk retrievals typically complete within 5–12 hours.
S3 Lifecycle policies: A lifecycle configuration is a set of rules that define actions that is applied to a
group of objects.
1.Transition actions: Define when objects transition to another storage class. For S3-IA and S3-One-
Zone, the objects must be stored at least 30 days in the current storage class before you can transition
them to another class.
2.Expiration actions: Define when objects expire. S3 deletes expired objects on your behalf.

File storage: Some applications need to access shared files and require a file system. This type of storage
is often supported with a Network Attached Storage (NAS) server and multiple clients (such as users,
applications, servers, and so on) can access data that is stored in shared file folders. It is ideal for use
cases like large content repositories, development environments, media stores, or user home
directories.
Amazon Elastic File System: EFS is a managed file system. It is a regional service and stores data in and
across multiple availability zones. The duplicate storage enables to access data concurrently from all the
availability zones in the region where a file system is located. On-premises server can access Amazon EFS
using AWS Direct Connect.
 EFS supports the Network File System version 4 protocol and is POSIX-compliant shared file storage.
 EFS filesystems can be mounted onto EC2 instances running Linux or MacOS Big Sur, ECS tasks, EKS
pods, and Lambda functions. Windows is not supported.
 Five EFS Lifecycle Management policies (7, 14, 30, 60, or 90 days) can be selected to automatically
move files into the EFS Infrequent Access (EFS IA) storage class and save up to 85% in cost.
 Amazon EFS offers four storage classes: Amazon EFS Standard, Amazon EFS Standard-Infrequent
Access (EFS Standard-IA), Amazon EFS One Zone, and Amazon EFS One Zone-Infrequent Access (EFS One
Zone-IA).