Storage

Question 1

Elastic Block Storage (EBS)

Answer 1

Features

• block is faster & lower bandwidth, but cost more than object storage
• Directly attached to EC2 instances (low latency)
• automatically replicated within AZ (not multiple AZs)
• Can be backed up to S3 via snapshots, charged per GB-month
• Encrypted at no additional cost
• Elastic - capacity & type, dynamically (no need stop instance)
• inbound data is free, outbound data across regions has fee

Typical Uses

• Boot volumes for EC2 (must be SSD)
• Data storage w/ file system
• database hosts
• enterprise applications

Types:

• SSD: General Purpose, IOPS (in/out per second optimized)
  
  • charged by amount provisioned until storage is released1
• HDD: Throughput-optimized, cold…
  
  • charged by number of requests to the volume

Question 2

Simple Storage Service (S3)

Answer 2

Features:

• Object Storage, in Buckets
• Single object size limited to 5TB
• eleven 9s of Durability
• Can encrypt in transit and at rest
• Standard (three AZ replication)
• Accessible via console, CLI, and SDK
• Fees for: GB/month, transfer OUT to other Regions, PUT, COPY, POST, LIST, and GET requests
• No fee for: transfers IN to S3, Out to CloudFront or EC2 in same region
• Naming - unique globally

Storage Classes:

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Question 3

Elastic File Service (EFS)

Answer 3

Features:

• File storage in the cloud
• petabyte scale, low-latency for big data/analytics, media processing, content management, web serving, home directories
• shared between EC2
• elastic capacity
• Supports NFS v4, compatible w/ Linux AMIs
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Question 4

S3 Glacier

Answer 4

Features:

• Glacier & Glacier Deep Archive
• eleven 9s of durability
• objects stored in vaults
• Expedited Retrieval: 1-5m
• Standard Retrieval: 3-5h
• Bulk Retrieval: 5-12h
• Accessible via console (limited), SDK, CLI
• Deep Archive: long term retention (7-10y), ≥ three AZs, Retrieval time w/in 12h
• Item size limit: 40TB
• Fees for Upload & Retrieval (per request and per GB)
• Data encrypted by default (vs. standard s3 - server side encryption)

Lifecycle policies: enables deletion or moving objects based on age

Question 5

Amazon ElasticCache

Answer 5

• fully managed, in-memory caching service supporting flexible, real-time use cases
• for use cases that don’t require durability like session stores, gaming leaderboards, streaming, and analytics

Question 6

S3 Storage Classes

Answer 6

• Standard (eleven 9s of durability, four 9s of availability)
• Intelligent - tiering (best for unpredictable access patterns)
• Standard - Infrequent Access (eleven 9s of durability, three 9s of availability)
• One Zone Infrequent Access
• Glacier
• Glacier Deep Archive