Amazon Web Services (AWS) is known for its vast number of product offerings. In the storage arena, three of amazon’s most popular services are S3, EFS, and EBS.
The question is, which one to use for your solution?
Fortunately, these services work differently from each other. So, once you have listed down your requirements clearly, it is easy to pick one over the other.
The storage strategy plays a crucial role in determining performance as well as expenditure. We have written up all you need to choose the right one.
Difference between S3 VS EFS VS EBS
· S3
It provides simple object storage. It manages data as objects which means all data types are stored in native formats. There is no relation between files. It is used to host images and videos, data analytics, mobile and web applications.
Data objects are distributed across several machines and are accessible from anywhere in the world. Files are managed with the help of metadata.
· EFS
It is an Elastic File Storage system that grows or shrinks as per resource requirements. It is similar to a traditional file storage system. The only difference is data is organized into directories and sub-directories. It is widely used for SaaS applications. You can use the same EFS to several EC2 instances simultaneously. It is fast and accessible. However, it fails to provide the potential to execute complex queries.
· EBS
AWS EBS is block-level data storage. It stores files in equal-sized multiple volumes called blocks. These blocks act as separate hard drives. Block storage devices provide higher performance than regular file storage. It is more flexible. You need to initialize EBS on an Amazon EC2 instance.
| Characteristics | S3 | EFS | EBS |
| Performance | Supports up to 3500 PUT/LIST/DELETE requests and 5500 GET requests per second Slower than EBS and EFS | Baseline performance: 3GB/s Upto 7K IOPS Faster than S3 but slower than EBS | 250-500 IOPS per volume for HDD and 16-64K per volume for SSD Faster than S3 and EFS |
| Storage and file size limit | No limit on storage. The individual object can be up to 5TB. | Max 16TB per volume Max 52TB for individual file | Max storage 16 TB No file size limit. |
| Accessibility | Accessible via the internet using APIs. It is accessible from anywhere. | Accessible from any region. It has up to 1000 concurrent EC2 instances. You can share files between different regions on multiple EFS instances. | Accessible via single EC2 instance. Accessible in a particular region. |
| Access Control | IAM user-based authentication. Uses user policies and bucket policies. Public access via block public access | IAM user-based authentication. Security groups. | IAM user-based authentication. Security groups. |
| Data backup and restoring | Use versioning or cross-region replication | EFS to EFS replication | Automated backups and snapshots |
| Cost | Pay per use Free: 5GB 1st 50 TB/month at $0.023/GB Next 450 TB/month at $0.022/GB Over 500 TB/month at $0.021/GB | Pay per use Standard storage: $0.30-$0.39 per GB per month (depends on region) Infrequent storage: $0.025-$0.03 per GB per month Provisioned throughput: $6 per MBps-month | Pay for provisioned capacity Free: 30GB General-purpose: $0.045 per Gb per month Provisioned SSD: $0.125 per GB/month, $0.065 per IOPS/month |
| Advantages | Easily scalable and can access multiple instances of EC2. Best used for data archiving | Faster than S3 with high IOPS and low latency Most scalable due to availability of multiple EC2 instances. Auto Scaling potential | Faster than S3 with high IOPS and low latency Cheaper than EFS. |
| Usage | Use for static storage like for website, media, and entertainment. Best to use for running analytics over static data pool present in S3 with the provision of running complex queries to draw insights | Best for large quantities of data. Large analytic workloads as in bigData analytics. Most suitable for a content management system. Must be used for lift and shift application support | Database backups and low latency applications Use EBS for high-performance storage service on a single device. Transactional and NoSQL databases |
IOPS = Input/Output operations per second
Conclusion
Amazon provides you with three options out of which one will match up with your requirement. Use S3 for static purposes. EFS can be used for an application that is highly scalable and high-performance oriented. EBS is best suited where a single device requires high performance. The best example of EBS will be transactional databases.
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