Object Storage vs Traditional Block and File Storage Service

Learn about the concepts of Object Storage, Traditional Block and File Storage Service below.

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)

• one of first services from AWS,
• serves as foundational web services
• Givs secure, durable, and highly-scalable cloud storage.
• easy-to-use object storage
• simple web service interface
• store and retrieve any amount of data
• pay only for the storage actually used

Amazon Glacier

• For data archiving and long-term backup at extremely low cost.
• suitable for “cold data,” or data, that is rarely accessed
• retrieval time 3 – 5 hours
• Usage as S3 storage class or separate archival storage service.

Object Storage vs Traditional Block and File Storage

2 storage service types

• Block storage – working at a lower level —the raw storage or at device level —and manages data as a set of numbered, fixed-size blocks.
• File storage operates at a higher level—the operating system level—and manages data as a named hierarchy of files and folders.
• Both are accessed over a network
• Storage Area Network (SAN) for block storage using iSCSI or Fibre Channel
• Network Attached Storage (NAS) file server or “filer” for file storage, using CIFS or NFS

S3 object

• contains both data and metadata
• bucket can contain an unlimited number of objects.
• reside in containers referred as ‘buckets’
• object is identified by a unique user-specified key (file_name).
• Buckets similar to flat folder with no file system hierarchy,
• Hence, have multiple buckets, but no sub-bucket
• S3 is an object for data portion of object
• S3 is a file, if key is the filename
• But, S3 is not a file system
• S3 has GET or PUT an object, working on whole object at once
• We cannot
  • mount a bucket
  • open an object
  • install an operating system on S3
  • run a database on S3