Additional Storage Services

Glacier

Archival data storage, costing fractions of a penny per GiB/month.

Three Access Methods:

Listed from most expensive to least expensive.

1. Expedited (3-5 minutes)
2. Standard (3-5 hours)
3. Bulk (5-12 hours)

You define the region for storage, where it is stored with AES-256-bit encryption.

Data Retrieval Up to 5% can be retrieved at no charge each month with no rollover.

• Your vault can be configured to limit costs.

Glacier & S3

2 ways to approach Glacier:

1. Set up a Glacier Vault.
2. Use it as a class in S3.
   • S3 cold data can automatically be moved into Glacier (via lifecycle rules).
   • Snow devices can be used to import data.
   • Storage Gateway can be connected to Glacier.
   • Objects in S3 become archives in Glacier Vaults (vaults can be locked if needed).

Glacier is not available in the free tier and your first vault is restricted to your default region.

ARN: Amazon Resource Name (unique identifier)

S3 Enhanced Features:

• Use lifecycle rules to implement itelligent tiering.
• S3 object lock supports write-once-read-many (WORM) as a file storage method.
• Batch Operations create jobs to enable automatic options.

Elastic Block Store (EBS)

• Used for durable storage in EC2 instances (persists even when an instance is turned off).
• Block-level storage from one AWS service to another.

EBS Volume Types:

1. Magnetic (cheapest, slowest) [Hard Drive] (free-tier eligible)
2. SSD
   • General Purpose
   • Provisioned IOPS (provisioned input/output operations per second)
     • If you need more than 10500 IOPS, you need PIOPS.
   • EBS-Optimized instances should be used to take full advantage of SSD storage.

Protecting EBS Data:

• Use snapshots (backup & duplicate instances)
• Volume recovery (caching volumes from one instance to another)
• Volume-Level encryption.

EBS isn’t offered as standalone service, but as an EC2 option (type of volume).

Elastic File System (EFS)

• Shareable between instances.
• Hierarchical (Real file/folder hierarchy).
  • Can be accessed through NFSv4 (Network File System) while EBS is tied to an instance.
• EC2 instances can use EFS shared, but windows instances cannot.
• EFS Shares can be limited to a Virtual Private Cloud.

EFS & PrivateLink:

• You can create a VPC endpoint to access services from other cloud accounts.
• PrivateLink: Allows for secure connection between VPCs, services and applications in AWS.

Amazon FSx

Like a small file sharing server, but in 2 different configurations:

1. Windows File Server
2. Lustre (the high-performance file system)

• It’s fully managed and automatically does the prep work, including building the server and joining the active directory.
• Can be deployed to one or multiple AZ zones.
• Windows authentication through Active Directory can be self-managed or managed by AWS.

Integrating On-Prem Storage

• Storage Gateway: Software application (VM) running on-prem.
  • Provides 3 Types:
    1. File-based (also provides an interface to S3 buckets)
    2. Volume-based (SCSI protocol)
    3. Tape-based (Virtual tape)

Storage Performance

SSD (General Purpose):

• Max IOPS: 10 000
• Max Volume: 1 GiB - 16 TiB

Provisioned IOPS SSD:

• Max IOPS: 32 000
• Max Volume: 4 - 16 TiB

HDD Throughput Optimized:

• Max IOPS: 500

HDD Cold:

• Max IOPS: 250