Do you know the difference between S3 versus EBS versus EFS? If not, then this video is for you.
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Hi, I'm Mike Gibbs and I've been in tech for over 25 years.
My mission is to make cloud computing technology simple and available for engineers,
architects and technology executives. We find that many aspiring cloud architects
have difficulty differentiating between S3 versus EBS versus EFS. So by the end of this video, you
will clearly understand and know the differences. We will begin our discussion with EBS.
So what is EBS or Elastic Block Storage? So EBS is high performance, non-volatile meaning it doesn't
go away, storage for compute instances in AWS. Now this is very different than instance storage.
Instance storage is the type of storage that comes with your virtual machine that gets deleted upon
instance termination. So realistically speaking, if you have any data that you want to store,
obviously it needs to be on something other than instance storage and EBS is a very good option.
EBS volumes are mounted and they're used directly by the host, just like a virtual hard drive.
EBS volumes are relatively high-performance and there's options, which we'll talk about later,
but these are virtual disks. So they're sitting on high performance RAID arrays, so they can give
you some really good performance along with some high availability and high redundancy.
So what is block storage? So, because EBS is block storage, block storage is a type of storage
that places data in blocks, and then stores those blocks in separate pieces.
Now, each block has an identifier and basically you're given the key effectively like a map of
how to put all the pieces and parts back together. And it's really high performance
because blocks can be placed wherever it's most efficient. And its very flexible storage can be
used with multiple types of operating systems such as Windows and Linux. But the point being
is because it can store the data in little blocks and place the blocks wherever it's most efficient,
and then you can reconstitute it on demand, it's very high performance.
So because it's high performance, when would you want to use this type of storage?
And quite frankly, the main reason you're using it is because you want
storage that doesn't go away upon instance termination, but instance storage is not
going to give you the performance you need to run a high performance applications.
We'll talk about some of those applications in a minute, but let's look at EBS options.
So you can buy provision input output per second, and what this is really giving you
is a high-performance low-latency drive. When we talk about input and output measures
per second, we're talking about how many reads and writes you can do at a time,
which is related to latency, which is different than throughput, which is, how many megabytes
or gigabytes you can move per second. So if you're dealing with a high performance application that's
sensitive to latency, you're really going to be using a provision of the IOPS volume.
Now, the next type of option that you could use is general purpose SSD volumes. Now these volumes
have great throughput, but they have obviously higher latency and then something if you're
purchasing the provision and input output per second, but these are really good options. They're
great for a host ... To boot up the host. They're also really great in a lab test environment where
you need a high performance storage higher than you can get with a magnetic RAID array,
but at the same time, you don't need to pay for the very expensive provision IOPS per second.
So this is typically where you'd use the general purpose SSD drives.
Now, you can also purchase throughput optimized EBS volumes. And what these things are really good
for, they're very good in terms of throughput, meaning it's there in terms of the amount of
megabit per second, but because of their magnetic drive they have much higher latency.
So this is good if you have to store large files very quickly, and you don't need the
low latency storage. And then your last option is a cold hard drive, which realistically speaking,
this is designed for low frequency read and writes, and you're probably not going to use it
for anything other than storage of large amounts of data that you don't need access to that often.
So now you know the types of EBS volumes and you know why you would use them. Next up, S3.
So what is S3? So S3 is known as Amazon Simple Storage, and it's some very interesting storage
that has a wide range of use cases on the AWS platform. The first thing we need to talk about
is S3 is object storage. Object storage breaks files into pieces called objects. Now each
object has a unique ID, and based upon their IDs, they're very easy to put back together.
But given that S3 is object storage, it cannot house an operating system. So the
operating system for an instance is going to have to be placed on instance storage
or an EBS volume of some kind. But S3 is a great place to store your data and many use cases,
which we'll talk about in a moment. The first thing you need to know is S3 is high
availability but really high durability storage in that it's available 99.99% of the time,
but it has 11 nines availability, which means 99.9999 all the way to nine more places.
So what that shows you is you're probably going to be able to access your data when
you need it with four nines availability and it's definitely going to be there or nearly definitely.
Even if it's down, it'll still be there later. So I mentioned that S3 has a lot
of uses on the AWS platform. So let's talk about some of those use cases very briefly.
It's a great place to backup your organization's data.
And whether it be just standard data that you're going to move there, or it'd be one
of your databases where you create a snapshot [inaudible 00:06:15] on S3, it's a great place
to house images of your virtual machines. It's a great place to store any kind of data really.
It's also great for static website hosting. For dynamic hosting you're going to need something
that's a little different. And it's great for distribution of content, software, media.
And because you can store so much on it at a relatively good price, it's great for disaster
recovery planning. But it also integrates with Redshift and a few other things for some big
data analytics. And that's, you'll see, as you can see S3 is used in a lot of use cases with Amazon,
and it's a great place to host internet applications.
So S3 has a lot of uses, but the key to remember, it's a place to store things,
but you can't store an operating system on them because it's object storage.
Next up EFS. So what is EFS? EFS is a high performance network file system. And that's the
key, it's a network file system. So that's where you're going to use this when you have 10, 20,
100, 1000 computers that need to access the same data on a network, so high performance network
computing. EFS volumes are high throughput, low latency because they have high IOPS
and it can be very high capacity. It's elastic in that it'll adjust size on demand. So you
really don't have to worry about running out of network storage, which is wonderful.
Now this is designed to be used, again by many computing instances at the same time. So you're
only going to use this when you need to store a lot of data on a network at a high performance
low latency base, where multiple users are going to use it. And it's POSIX compatible. What that
really means in today's world is that it can still inter-operate with some legacy systems.
So in summary, let's talk about the three types of storage again. We have EBS,
which is high performance storage for compute systems. So high performance storage for the host.
We have EFS, which is high performance network storage.
So again, this is high performance network storage when multiple hosts need to access
the same data. And we have S3, which is object storage, which is used for backups,
contest distribution, static website hosting, and a whole lot more applications on the AWS platform.
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