Eight types of AWS storage services explained

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is one of the most competent cloud service providers in the world right now. In this tech guide we explore eight of the storage services made available by Amazon Web Services (AWS). Furthermore, this article will also provide in-detail aspects of AWS storage services and their best practices.

Over the years, data storage has been diversified vastly to cater to varying needs.  Ranging from the needs of a single person to a multinational company, data storage has become a must-have factor for everyone. Starting from ‘Punch Cards’ which are used to communicate information to equipment – even before computers evolved to ‘Cloud Storage’; which is the most popular storage option currently available – data storage technologies have transformed and are still evolving day by day.

Among the hundreds of cloud service providers, Amazon Web Services (AWS) dominates the digital market and is a flexible, cost-effective, easy-to-use cloud computing platform.

This article will help understand different storage services and features available in the AWS Cloud

First, to provide context to this post, let’s take a couple of minutes to understand the following important terms:

1. AWS Region – an AWS Region is a demarcated geographic area. Each region consists of multiple, isolated locations known as Availability Zones. Currently AWS avails 16 regions such as US East (N. Virginia), Canada (Central), EU (Ireland), EU (Paris), Asia Pacific (Singapore) and so on.
2. AWS Availability Zone – an AWS Availability Zone is an isolated location within a region. Each region is made up by several Availability Zones. Each       Availability Zone belongs to a single region.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides low-cost data storage with high durability and high availability. AWS offers storage choices for backing up information, archiving, and disaster recovery.

We have compiled a list of the main storage services available on the AWS Cloud, as follows:

1. Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)

2. Amazon Glacier

3. Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS)

4. Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS)

5. Amazon EC2 Instance Storage

6. AWS Storage Gateway

7. AWS Snowball

8. Amazon CloudFront

Furthermore, this article will explore all of the above mentioned storage services but will exclude Amazon database services such as AWS RDS, Amazon DynamoDB etc.