AWS STORAGE SERVICES

SALMAN ABDUL KARIM

https://www.linkedin.com/in/salmanabdulkarim/
Contents
Instance Stores and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) ............................................................4
Instance stores .......................................................................................................................................... 4
Amazon Elastic Block Storage (Amazon EBS) ............................................................................................ 6
Amazon EBS Snapshots ......................................................................................................................7
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) ......................................................................................8
Object Storage .......................................................................................................................................... 8
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) ......................................................................................8
Amazon S3 Storage Classes ................................................................................................................9
S3 Standard ............................................................................................................................................... 9
S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA)...................................................................................... 9
S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access (S3 One Zone-IA).................................................................................... 9
S3 Intelligent-Tiering ............................................................................................................................... 10
S3 Glacier ................................................................................................................................................ 10
S3 Glacier Deep Archive .......................................................................................................................... 10
Amazon EBS vs Amazon S3 ............................................................................................................... 11
Amazon EBS and Amazon S3 ............................................................................................................ 11
Amazon EFS ..................................................................................................................................... 13
Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) ......................................................................................... 14
File Storage ............................................................................................................................................. 14
Comparing Amazon EBS and Amazon EFS .............................................................................................. 14
Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS).......................................................................... 15
Relational databases ............................................................................................................................... 15
Amazon Relational Database Service...................................................................................................... 15
Amazon RDS database engines ......................................................................................................... 16
Amazon Aurora ....................................................................................................................................... 16
Amazon DynamoDB ................................................................................................................................ 16
Nonrelational Databases..................................................................................................................... 16
Amazon DynamoDB ............................................................................................................................ 17
Serverless................................................................................................................................................ 17
Automatic Scaling ................................................................................................................................... 17
AMAZON RDS vs AMAZON DYNAMO DB........................................................................................... 18
Amazon Redshift.............................................................................................................................. 19
AWS DMS (Data Migration Serves) ................................................................................................... 19
Homogeneous migrations ...................................................................................................................... 19
heterogeneous migration ....................................................................................................................... 19
Additional Database Services ........................................................................................................... 20
Amazon DocumentDB ............................................................................................................................. 20
Amazon Neptune .................................................................................................................................... 20
Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (Amazon QLDB) ............................................................................. 20
Amazon Managed Blockchain ................................................................................................................. 20
Amazon ElastiCache ................................................................................................................................ 20
Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator............................................................................................................. 21
Instance Stores and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon
EBS)

Instance stores
Block-level storage volumes behave like physical hard drives.

An instance store provides temporary block-level storage for an Amazon EC2 instance. An instance store is
disk storage that is physically attached to the host computer for an EC2 instance, and therefore has the same
lifespan as the instance. When the instance is terminated, you lose any data in the instance store.

An Amazon EC2 instance with an attached instance store is running.

The instance is stopped or terminated.

All data on the attached instance store is deleted.

Amazon Elastic Block Storage (Amazon EBS)
Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) is a service that provides block-level storage volumes that you can
use with Amazon EC2 instances. If you stop or terminate an Amazon EC2 instance, all the data on the
attached EBS volume remains available.

To create an EBS volume, you define the configuration (such as volume size and type) and provision it. After
you create an EBS volume, it can attach to an Amazon EC2 instance.

Because EBS volumes are for data that needs to persist, it’s important to back up the data. You can take
incremental backups of EBS volumes by creating Amazon EBS snapshots.
Amazon EBS Snapshots
An EBS snapshot is an incremental backup. This means that the first backup taken of a volume copies all the
data. For subsequent backups, only the blocks of data that have changed since the most recent snapshot are
saved.

Incremental backups are different from full backups, in which all the data in a storage volume copies each
time a backup occurs. The full backup includes data that has not changed since the most recent backup.
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)

Object Storage
In object storage, each object consists of data, metadata, and a key.

The data might be an image, video, text document, or any other type of file. Metadata contains information
about what the data is, how it is used, the object size, and so on. An object’s key is its unique identifier.

Recall that when you modify a file in block storage, only the pieces that are changed are updated. When a file
in object storage is modified, the entire object is updated.

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is a service that provides object-level storage. Amazon S3
stores data as objects in buckets.

You can upload any type of file to Amazon S3, such as images, videos, text files, and so on. For example, you
might use Amazon S3 to store backup files, media files for a website, or archived documents. Amazon S3
offers unlimited storage space. The maximum file size for an object in Amazon S3 is 5 TB.

When you upload a file to Amazon S3, you can set permissions to control visibility and access to it. You can
also use the Amazon S3 versioning feature to track changes to your objects over time.
Amazon S3 Storage Classes
With Amazon S3, you pay only for what you use. You can choose from a range of storage classes to select a fit
for your business and cost needs. When selecting an Amazon S3 storage class, consider these two factors:

• How often you plan to retrieve your data

• How available you need your data to be

S3 Standard
• Designed for frequently accessed data
• Stores data in a minimum of three Availability Zones

S3 Standard provides high availability for objects. This makes it a good choice for a wide range of use cases,
such as websites, content distribution, and data analytics. S3 Standard has a higher cost than other storage
classes intended for infrequently accessed data and archival storage.

S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA)

• Ideal for infrequently accessed data
• Similar to S3 Standard but has a lower storage price and higher retrieval price

S3 Standard-IA is ideal for data infrequently accessed but requires high availability when needed. Both S3
Standard and S3 Standard-IA store data in a minimum of three Availability Zones. S3 Standard-IA provides the
same level of availability as S3 Standard but with a lower storage price and a higher retrieval price.

S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access (S3 One Zone-IA)

• Stores data in a single Availability Zone
• Has a lower storage price than S3 Standard-IA

Compared to S3 Standard and S3 Standard-IA, which store data in a minimum of three Availability Zones, S3
One Zone-IA stores data in a single Availability Zone. This makes it a good storage class to consider if the
following conditions apply:

• You want to save costs on storage.

• You can easily reproduce your data in the event of an Availability Zone failure.
S3 Intelligent-Tiering
• Ideal for data with unknown or changing access patterns
• Requires a small monthly monitoring and automation fee per object

In the S3 Intelligent-Tiering storage class, Amazon S3 monitors objects’ access patterns. If you haven’t
accessed an object for 30 consecutive days, Amazon S3 automatically moves it to the infrequent access tier,
S3 Standard-IA. If you access an object in the infrequent access tier, Amazon S3 automatically moves it to the
frequent access tier, S3 Standard.

S3 Glacier
• Low-cost storage designed for data archiving
• Able to retrieve objects within a few minutes to hours

S3 Glacier is a low-cost storage class that is ideal for data archiving. For example, you might use this storage
class to store archived customer records or older photos and video files.

S3 Glacier Deep Archive

• Lowest-cost object storage class ideal for archiving
• Able to retrieve objects within 12 hours

When deciding between Amazon S3 Glacier and Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive, consider how quickly you
need to retrieve archived objects. You can retrieve objects stored in the S3 Glacier storage class within a few
minutes to a few hours. By comparison, you can retrieve objects stored in the S3 Glacier Deep Archive
storage class within 12 hours.
Amazon EBS vs Amazon S3

Amazon EBS and Amazon S3

When you store data in EBS, it's break file into components or blocks
When you store data in S3, it stores data as a complete discreate object

Round 1:
Let's say you're running a photo analysis website where users upload a photo of
themselves and your application finds the animals that look just like them.
You have potentially millions of animal pictures that all need to be indexed and possibly
viewed by thousands of people at once.
This is the perfect use case for S3.

S3 is already web-enabled.
Every object already has a URL that you can control access rights to who can see or manage the image.
It's regionally distributed, which means that it has 11 9's of durability.
No need to worry about backup strategies. S3 is your backup strategy.
Plus the cost savings is substantial overrunning the same storage load on EBS,
with the additional advantage of being server less. No Amazon EC2 instances are needed.

Round 2:
you have an 80-gigabyte video file that you're making edit corrections on.
To know the best storage class here, we need to understand the difference between
object storage and block storage. Object storage treats any file
as a complete discrete object.

Now, this is great for documents, and images,

and video files that get
uploaded and consumed as entire objects.

But every time there's a change to the object,

you must re-upload the entire file.
There are no Delta updates.

Block storage breaks those files down to small component parts or blocks.
This means for that 80-gigabyte file, when you make an edit to one scene in
the film and save that change, the engine only updates the blocks where those bits live.
If you're making a bunch of micro edits using EBS, Elastic Block Storage is the perfect use case.
If you were using S3, every time you save the changes, the system would have to upload all 80 gigabytes, that
whole thing every time.
Amazon EFS
Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS)
File Storage
In file storage, multiple clients (such as users, applications, servers, and so on) can access data that is stored
in shared file folders. In this approach, a storage server uses block storage with a local file system to organize
files. Clients access data through file paths.

Compared to block storage and object storage, file storage is ideal for use cases in which a large number of
services and resources need to access the same data at the same time.

Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) is a scalable file system used with AWS Cloud services and on-
premises resources. As you add and remove files, Amazon EFS grows and shrinks automatically. It can scale
on demand to petabytes without disrupting applications.

Comparing Amazon EBS and Amazon EFS

Amazon EBS

• An Amazon EBS volume stores data in a single Availability Zone.

• To attach an Amazon EC2 instance to an EBS volume, both the Amazon EC2 instance and the
EBS volume must reside within the same Availability Zone.

Amazon EFS

• Amazon EFS is a regional service. It stores data in and across multiple Availability Zones.
• The duplicate storage enables you to access data concurrently from all the Availability Zones in
the Region where a file system is located. Additionally, on-premises servers can access
Amazon EFS using AWS Direct Connect.
Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS)

Relational databases
In a relational database, data is stored in a way that relates it to other pieces of data.

An example of a relational database might be the coffee shop’s inventory management system. Each record
in the database would include data for a single item, such as product name, size, price, and so on.

Relational databases use structured query language (SQL) to store and query data. This approach allows data
to be stored in an easily understandable, consistent, and scalable way. For example, the coffee shop owners
can write a SQL query to identify all the customers whose most frequently purchased drink is a medium latte.

Example of data in a relational database:

ID Product Name Size Price

1 Medium roast ground coffee 12 oz. $5.30
2 Dark roast ground coffee 20 oz. $9.27

Amazon Relational Database Service

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is a service that enables you to run relational databases
in the AWS Cloud.

Amazon RDS is a managed service that automates tasks such as hardware provisioning, database setup,
patching, and backups. With these capabilities, you can spend less time completing administrative tasks and
more time using data to innovate your applications. You can integrate Amazon RDS with other services to
fulfill your business and operational needs, such as using AWS Lambda to query your database from a
serverless application.

Amazon RDS provides a number of different security options. Many Amazon RDS database engines offer
encryption at rest (protecting data while it is stored) and encryption in transit (protecting data while it is
being sent and received).
Amazon RDS database engines
Amazon RDS is available on six database engines, which optimize for memory, performance, or input/output
(I/O). Supported database engines include:

• Amazon Aurora
• PostgreSQL
• MySQL
• MariaDB
• Oracle Database
• Microsoft SQL Server

Amazon Aurora
Amazon Aurora is an enterprise-class relational database. It is compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL
relational databases. It is up to five times faster than standard MySQL databases and up to three times faster
than standard PostgreSQL databases.

Amazon Aurora helps to reduce your database costs by reducing unnecessary input/output (I/O) operations,
while ensuring that your database resources remain reliable and available.

Consider Amazon Aurora if your workloads require high availability. It replicates six copies of your data across
three Availability Zones and continuously backs up your data to Amazon S3.

Amazon DynamoDB

Nonrelational Databases
In a nonrelational database, you create tables. A table is a place where you can store and query data.

Nonrelational databases are sometimes referred to as “NoSQL databases” because they use structures other
than rows and columns to organize data. One type of structural approach for nonrelational databases is key-
value pairs. With key-value pairs, data is organized into items (keys), and items have attributes (values). You
can think of attributes as being different features of your data.

In a key-value database, you can add or remove attributes from items in the table at any time. Additionally,
not every item in the table has to have the same attributes.
Example of data in a nonrelational database:

Key Value
1 Name: John Doe
Address: 123 Any Street
Favorite drink: Medium latte
2 Name: Mary Major
Address: 100 Main Street
Birthday: July 5, 1994
Amazon DynamoDB
Amazon DynamoDB is a key-value database service. It delivers single-digit millisecond performance at any
scale.

Serverless
• DynamoDB is serverless, which means that you do not have to provision, patch, or manage
servers.
• You also do not have to install, maintain, or operate software.

Automatic Scaling
• As the size of your database shrinks or grows, DynamoDB automatically scales to adjust for
changes in capacity while maintaining consistent performance.
• This makes it a suitable choice for use cases that require high performance while scaling.
AMAZON RDS vs AMAZON DYNAMO DB
Amazon Redshift

Amazon Redshift is a data warehousing service that you can use for big data analytics. It offers the ability to
collect data from many sources and helps you to understand relationships and trends across your data.

AWS DMS (Data Migration Serves)

Homogeneous migrations
can be from MySQL to Amazon RDS for MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server to Amazon RDS for SQL Server, or
even Oracle to Amazon RDS for Oracle. The process is fairly straight forward.
Since schema structures, data types, and database code is compatible between source and target.

heterogeneous migration
The second type of migration occurs when source and target databases are of different types.
This is called heterogeneous migration and it's a 2-step process.
Since the schema structures, data types, and database code are different between source and target,
we first need to convert them using the AWS schema conversion tool.
This will convert the source schema and code to match that of the target database.
The next step is then to use DMS to migrate data from the source database
to the target database.
Additional Database Services

Amazon DocumentDB
Amazon DocumentDB is a document database service that supports MongoDB workloads. (MongoDB is a
document database program.)

Amazon Neptune
Amazon Neptune is a graph database service.

You can use Amazon Neptune to build and run applications that work with highly connected datasets, such as
recommendation engines, fraud detection, and knowledge graphs.

Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (Amazon QLDB)

Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (Amazon QLDB) is a ledger database service.

You can use Amazon QLDB to review a complete history of all the changes that have been made to your
application data.

Amazon Managed Blockchain

Amazon Managed Blockchain is a service that you can use to create and manage blockchain networks with
open-source frameworks.

Blockchain is a distributed ledger system that lets multiple parties run transactions and share data without a
central authority.

Amazon ElastiCache
Amazon ElastiCache is a service that adds caching layers on top of your databases to help improve the read
times of common requests.

It supports two types of data stores: Redis and Memcached.

Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator
Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) is an in-memory cache for DynamoDB.

It helps improve response times from single-digit milliseconds to microseconds.

THESE NOTES I CREATED FROM THE COURSE:
https://www.coursera.org/learn/aws-cloud-practitioner-essentials