AWS Storage Services: S3 vs EBS vs EFS

Alexy Pulivelil
3 min readMar 4, 2023

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Businesses today produce and handle enormous volumes of data. The way data is processed, stored, and analysed has been completely transformed by cloud computing. One of the top cloud computing platforms, Amazon Web Services (AWS), offers a variety of storage options. We’ll go over some of the well-liked AWS storage services that can be utilised to store data in this blog, along with their features and advantages.

AWS S3(Simple Storage Service):

Any quantity of data can be stored and retrieved with this scalable object storage service from any location on the internet. Files, pictures, movies, and other unstructured data are frequently stored and retrieved using this method. Amazon S3 is a popular option for data storage because of its great durability, availability, and scalability.

Features:

  1. Amazon S3 is built to offer durability of 99.999999999% and can sustain simultaneous data loss in two facilities.
  2. Amazon S3 can scale to store any amount of data, and it can handle millions of requests per second.
  3. Amazon S3 is a cost-effective storage service, and it provides different storage classes that offer different levels of durability, availability, and retrieval times.

Amazon EBS(Elastic Block Storage):

A block-level storage solution called Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) offers persistent block storage for Amazon EC2 instances. It offers low-latency data access and is appropriate for applications that need frequent, quick data access. A primary storage solution can be created by attaching Amazon EBS volumes to an EC2 instance.

Features:

  1. High-performance applications may access data with reduced latency thanks to Amazon EBS.
  2. With EBS, you can duplicate snapshots throughout AWS regions and place resources and data in multiple locations.
  3. Any quantity of data can be stored using Amazon EBS, which can also support millions of I/O operations per second.

Amazon EFS(Elastic File System):

A fully managed, scalable, and shared file storage service, Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) enables shared access to files across many instances. It is intended to offer low-latency, high throughput data access, even for workloads up to 500,000 IOPS or 10 GB per second.

Features:

  1. Provides shared access to files across multiple instances
  2. Supports multiple access protocols, including NFSv4, NFSv4.1, and NFSv4.2
  3. Automatically scale your file system storage up or down
  4. Big data applications, which need high node throughput, low-latency file access, and read-after-write activities, can be operated on EFS

To summarise, AWS offers a variety of storage services to accommodate various company requirements. Any quantity of data can be stored and retrieved using the scalable object storage service Amazon S3. Persistent block storage for EC2 instances is offered by Amazon EBS, a block-level storage utility. Amazon EFS is a fully managed, scalable, and shared file storage service that provides shared access to files across multiple instances. Amazon RDS, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon ElastiCache, and Amazon Redshift are just a few of the additional storage services that AWS offers. These services offer scalable and dependable storage options for various kinds of data.

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Alexy Pulivelil

AWS Community Builder | Google Cloud Ready Facilitator | Cloud Enthusiast | DevOps Engineer | Youtuber — Techino Tech4u