What is Amazon S3?
Finding a means to store, disseminate, and manage all of your data is difficult. Operating apps, delivering information to users, hosting high-traffic websites, and loading up document databases and email are all tasks that need to be completed. All these things necessitate a lot of storage, and the demand for more storage capacity grows daily.
Creating and maintaining your storage repository is costly and time-consuming. You must purchase racks and dedicated hardware and software racks and then engage staff to set up sophisticated processes.
Adding more capacity costs money, time, and effort to deploy more servers, hard drives, and backup machines, and guessing how much capacity you’ll need in the future is difficult. Getting this wrong means either not having enough storage or overspending and winding up with overcapacity that sits idle.
The Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is a simple web services interface that allows developers and IT teams to store and retrieve an unlimited volume of information from Amazon or elsewhere on the internet at any hour.
Select the area where you want your data to be kept, create a bucket, and you’re ready to start storing data in Amazon S3. You won’t require a crystal ball to figure out how much storage you’ll need tomorrow because Amazon S3 allows you to store as much data as you want and reach it anytime you wish. The last thing you want to bother about when it comes to storage is losing important data.
What is Amazon EBS?
The Amazon elastic block store, or EBS, is a type of Amazon cloud storage that offers Amazon EC2 instances with permanent block-level storage. To protect you against component failure and provide high availability and durability, Amazon EBS is automatically replicated inside its availability zone.
So, EBS stands for Elastic Block Store, which is the disc volumes you connect to your EC2 instance. You can build an EBS volume in the management interface; when you do, you must specify the region and availability zone for it.
You can alternatively utilize the Amazon API or command-line tools to build new volumes. The screen illustrates how to build a volume using the AWS CLI create volume command. Mention that the size of the volume availability zone and the volume type are defined in the command; the region is assumed from the AWS, CLI default settings. You can also use snapshots to copy a volume to a different region.
Important to note is that both Amazon EBS and instance store volumes have a first access penalty, which can result in a 5 to 50% decrease in performance on the first read or write. It is recommended that you want the volume to prevent this penalty from affecting production workloads, though this is not required and may not be noticeable in many cases.
Using raid arrays, Amazon EBS volumes can be stripped raid zero for performance or configured redundant storage raid 1 for disaster recovery. Raid arrays can be created using standard operating system tools.
Difference Between Amazon S3 and Amazon EBS
- Amazon S3 provides quick scalability to its consumers; resources can be supplied and de-provisioned in real time. However, EBS does not have this functionality; storage resources must be increased or decreased manually.
- Amazon S3 storage enables you to use a utility-based approach and pay according to your usage, whereas Elastic block storage requires you to pay for the supplied capacity.
- The contents in an S3 bucket are unorganized and may be fetched via HTTP protocols or even BitTorrent. In contrast, the data in an EBS instance is solely accessible by the instance to which it is attached.
- Amazon S3 ensures data stability by holding it superfluously across many Availability Zones, whereas EBS ensures data durability by keeping it redundantly in a single Availability Zone.
- Amazon S3 utilizes versioning and cross-region replication for backup, whereas EBS’ backup capability relies on snapshots and scheduled backups.
Comparison Between Amazon S3 and Amazon EBS
| Parameters of Comparison | Amazon S3 | Amazon EBS |
| Backup and restore | Versioning or cross-region replication are two options for Amazon S3. | Backups and snapshots that are automatically created |
| Durability | Multiple azs are used to store Amazon S3 data. | Amazon EBS is redundantly stored in a single AZ. |
| Scalability | Amazon S3’s scalability is limitless. | EBS (Amazon Simple Storage Service) Manually increase or reduce the size |
| Access | Amazon S3 is available both publicly and privately. | Only the linked EC2 instance has access to Amazon EBS. |
| Pricing | The Amazon S3 service is a pay-per-use model. | Pay for provided capacity with Amazon EBS. |