AWS Cloud Storage - Part 2

This post is continuation to my previous post on AWS Cloud Storage. In this post I will discuss about the other offerings/options that Amazon provides with respect to storage.

Amazon Elastic File System (EFS)
Amazon EFS delivers a simple, scalable, elastic, highly available and highly durable network file system as a service to EC2 instances.It supports Network File System versions 4 (NFSv4) and 4.1 (NFSv4.1), which makes it easy to migrate enterprise applications to AWS or build new ones.
Amazon EFS is designed to meet the needs of multi-threaded applications and applications that concurrently access data from multiple EC2 instances and that require substantial levels of aggregate throughput and input/output operations per second (IOPS). 

Amazon Elastic Block Storage(EBS)
Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes provide durable block-level storage for use with EC2 instances.  Amazon EBS volumes are network-attached storage that persists independently from the running life of a single EC2 instance. After an EBS volume is attached to an EC2 instance, you can use the EBS volume like a physical hard drive, typically by formatting it with the file system of your choice and using the file I/O interface provided by the instance operating system. Most Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) are backed by Amazon EBS, and use an EBS volume to boot EC2 instances. You can also attach multiple EBS volumes to a single EC2 instance. Note, however, that any single EBS volume can be attached to only one EC2 instance at any time. EBS also provides the ability to create point-in-time snapshots of volumes, which are stored in Amazon S3.

Amazon EBS is meant for data that changes relatively frequently and needs to persist beyond the life of EC2 instance. Amazon EBS is well-suited for use as the primary storage for a database or file system, or for any application or instance (operating system) that requires direct access to raw block-level storage. Amazon EBS provides a range of options that allow you to optimize storage performance and cost for your workload. These options are divided into two major categories: solid-state drive (SSD)-backed storage for transactional workloads such as databases and boot volumes (performance depends primarily on IOPS) and hard disk drive (HDD)-backed storage for throughput-intensive workloads such as big data, data warehouse, and log processing (performance depends primarily on MB/s).

Amazon EC2 Instance Storage
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 Amazon Web Services – AWS Storage Services Overview Page 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. 

AWS Storage Gateway
Service that connects your on-premises to aws cloud. The service enables you to securely store data in the AWS Cloud for scalable and cost-effective storage. AWS Storage Gateway supports industry standard storage protocols that work with your existing applications. It provides low-latency performance by maintaining frequently accessed data on-premises while securely storing all of your data encrypted in Amazon S3 or Amazon Glacier. You can download the AWS Storage Gateway software appliance as a virtual machine (VM) image that you install on a host in your data center or as an EC2 instance.
Types

• File gate (NFS) - flat files in S3 (pdf, jpeg ,word etc)
• Volumes Gateway(iSCSI) - Block storage , virtual hard disk (will not be stored in S3)
• stored volumes - whole data
• cached volumes  - cached data
• Tape Gateway (VTL) - virtual tapes

AWS Snowball
AWS import/export to accelerate moving large amounts of data into and out of AWS.
Types

• snowball - peta bytes scale data transfer solution only storage
• Snowball edge - 100tb data with storage and compute (little aws data center)
• snowmobile - shipping container for hexa byte of data 100pb per snowmobile , data centre migration

AWS CloudFront
CloudFront is a content delivery service that speeds up the distribution of your website’s dynamic, static, and streaming content by making it available from a global network of edge locations. CDN is a system of distributed servers that deliver web pages and web content to user based on the geographic locations of the user, the origin of the web page and a content delivery server.

• Edge location - location where content will be cached.
• Origin - origin of all files that CDN will distribute (S3, EC2, ELB, route 53).
• Distribution - this it he name given the CDN which consists of collection of edge locations.
• Web distribution - for web sites.
• RTMP - used for media streaming.
• Edge location are not just read only , you can write to them too.
• Objects are cached for the life of TTL(time to live).
• you can clear the cached object but you will be charged.