S3 Vs EBS Vs EFS - Infiflex

Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service), EBS (Elastic Block Store) and EFS (Elastic File System) are three different storage types, designed by Amazon Web Services. All these services are great, but only if you use them in accordance with their purpose. Also, what benefits you are looking for.

What is S3?

AWS ( S3) is storage for the internet. Objects in Amazon S3 are associated with a unique identifier key, so that you can use S3 to store and retrieve any amount of data at any time, from anywhere on the web.

Amazon S3 also allows hosting static website content.

Classes of S3:

Amazon S3 is a pioneer in cloud data storage and has uncountable benefits, but let’s have a look at the five most prominent ones:

1. Reliable Security
2. 99.99% Availability
3. Cost-efficient, Pay-as-you-go
4. Ease of Migration
5. The Simplicity of Management
6. Auto-Sync from source
7. I/O log report

What is EBS (Elastic Block Store)?

Amazon EBS or Elastic Block Storage is basically designed to store a large amount of data attached to an Amazon EC2 instance, similar to a local disk drive on your physical machine. Amazon EBS only allows one to attach the volume to another EC2 instance or keep it in a standby mode. If you need more storage space, you have to buy and configure a completely new volume to store bigger data. Every computer needs a drive and a virtual machine is not an exception. It stores data as blocks of the same size and organizes them through the hierarchy similar to a traditional file system.

There are three types of volumes in Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)

• General Purpose (SSD) Volumes - gp2
• Provisioned IOPS (SSD) Volumes
• Magnetic Volumes

What is EFS (Elastic File System)?

It is a shared, elastic file storage system that grows and shrinks as you add and remove files. If you want to run an application with high workloads that need scalable storage and relatively fast output, Amazon Elastic File System was created to fulfill those needs. You can ascend EFS onto several EC2 instances at the same time.

Amazon EFS offers two storage classes

1. The Standard storage class
2. The Infrequent Access storage class (EFS IA)

The Standard storage class is made for active file system workloads and you pay only for the amount of file system storage you use per month.

The Infrequent Access storage class is designed for cost-optimization for files accessed less frequently. Data stored on the Infrequent Access storage class costs less than Standard and you will pay a fee each time you read or write to a file. EFS IA provides price per performance that's cost-optimized for files not accessed every day.

By simply enabling EFS Lifecycle Management on your file system, files not accessed according to the lifecycle policy you choose will be automatically and transparently moved into EFS IA. The EFS IA storage class costs only $0.025/GB-month.

While workload patterns vary, customers typically find that 80% of files are infrequently accessed (and suitable for EFS IA), and 20% are actively used (suitable for EFS Standard), resulting in an effective storage cost as low as $0.08/GB-month*. Amazon EFS transparently serves files from both storage classes in a common file system namespace.

Advantages of using: (Elastic File System)

1. POSIX-compliant shared file storage
2. Scalable performance
3. Dynamic elasticity
4. Fully managed
5. Cost-effective
6. Security and compliance

If you need help deciding which technology is the best fit for your unique business challenges and goals, let Infiflex help. Our team of AWS Certified Engineers and other experts can advise you on which storage solution may be best for your organization. In fact, Infiflex can tailor the level of support you need, even taking over the implementation and management of your storage solution, entirely. And by engaging our knowledgeable team you can get the most value out of whichever solution you choose.