As the business world becomes smarter, data become vital for any type of business. It serves a key role for competitive advantage because the ability of a company to compete will be driven by how well it leverages data. Your business data are the gears that keep the organization moving. Data storage strategy and its security are necessary for every company or business regardless of its size. Besides, there should be easy and organized access to stored data and information to make the business successful.
So, where do you store your data? And how do you secure the data? This is where the solution to AWS cloud storage comes in.
AWS cloud storage allows businesses to save files, information and user data on the cloud and saves the untenable costs of maintaining, monitoring, and hosting it on their own. It's not just about storing data but in a secure way. AWS cloud storage ensures data security through data encryption, data backup, easy data recovery, and protection from hackers & data loss.
The AWS cloud offers a broad range of storage and cost management options, each of which has its specific use case. The most popular types of Amazon storage options are:
This array of amazon cloud storage options sometimes confuses the organizations when it comes to selecting the right option. Comparing their performance, availability, and price schemes can help to make the decision on which AWS storage option to choose.
Amazon S3, the object storage service is the first publicly available cloud storage service launched by Amazon in 2006. Amazon S3 is a well-known and most used Amazon storage option. It allows you to store an infinite amount of data that can be accessed programmatically via different methods like REST API, SOAP, web interface, and more. It is an ideal storage option for videos, images and application data.
The total price of Amazon S3 usage depends on various factors including the amount of storage used, the number of GET/PUT/LIST/POST/COPY requests and data transfers.
A photo-sharing site relies completely on Amazon S3 to store and display photos uploaded by their end-users. Their current end-user customer base is about 8,000, and on average, 4,000 users upload around 60,000 photos per month. The approximate average size of each photo is around 1MB. Each photo is viewed around three times per month.
Let’s calculate the tentative costs incurred by this photo sharing site:
Total storage per month: 60,000 images x 1MB = 60,000MB = 60GB
Storage cost for 60GB: 60GB x $0.03 = $1.80/month
Total PUT/POST requests per month: 60,000 requests
PUT/POST request cost: 60,000 x ($0.005/1000) = $0.30/month
Total GET requests per month: 60,000 photographs x 3 views = 180,000 requests
Total GET request cost: 180,000 x ($0.004/1000) = $0.24/month
Total data transfer OUT cost from Amazon S3 to the internet: 60GB of data x 3 views x $0.09 per GB = $16.20/ month
Total cost = $18.54/month (storage cost + PUT/POST request cost + GET request cost + data transfer cost)
Amazon Glacier the low-cost storage solution is widely used for data archive and backup. Its data retrieval process is too long; hence, Glacier should only be used for data accessed very infrequently.
A Big Data company generates many log files (~5TB per month) from their data analysis that needs to be retained for a long period due to compliance constraints. However, there is no immediate need to access this log data. Therefore, the company decided to go with Amazon Glacier for storage.
The estimated price for storing this data in Glacier is around $50 per month.
Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) is another common storage option offered by Amazon. Unlike Amazon S3, which is object storage, Amazon EBS volumes provide persistent block-level storage designed for Amazon EC2. It is like an external hard drive attached to your system. Amazon EBS volumes offer different storage sizes from 1GB to 16TB and come in three options:
By default, AWS allows you to have 5,000 EBS volumes, 20TB of Magnetic storage, 20TB of SSD Storage, 20TB of Provisioned IOPS and 40,000 Provisioned IOPS. You can also request AWS if you need more storage.
A healthcare company needs to store 7TB of data in the distributed replicated mode, for their shared application and medical records. For this, they use Gluster storage, which allows their application instances to access shared storage. They use two EC2 instances, each with four EBS 1TB SSD volumes. These volumes are configured in distributed replicated mode and the Gluster volume is mounted on other instances that also require access.
Now, let’s calculate the cost of this use case:
Total storage = 2 instances x 4TB EBS SSD volumes = 8TB EBS SSD volumes
Total price = 8TB (8,000GB) x $0.10 per GB/month = $800 per month
Amazon Storage Gateway unites the on-premises software application with cloud-based storage. It provides seamless and secure integration between your on-premises IT environment & the Amazon storage infrastructure. It supports three configurations - Gateway-Cached Volumes, Gateway-Virtual Tape Library (VTL) and Gateway-Stored Volumes.
As this service sits between Amazon S3, your application, and underlying on-premises storage, its performance depends on the following factors:
A single Tape Gateway constructed with 10 full 100 GB tapes and stores online backups. If you plan for 5 more 100 GB tapes archived in the cloud, and plan to retrieve one of these tapes to restore a backup:
The first 100GB is free. In this example, that's one tape stored locally
Online (local) tape storage capacity cost = $.023/GB/month
Hence, 900 GB’s cost = $20.70/month
Offline (cloud archive) tape storage capacity cost = $.004/GB/month
Hence, 500 GB’s cost = $2/month
Archived tape retrieval cost = $.01/GB, so a full 100 GB tape cost = $3 to retrieve
The data transfer cost is $.09/GB, so 100 GB Costs $9 to transfer back to your premises
In this scenario, you can protect 1TB of capacity with an additional 500 GB archive or $22.70 per month. Retrieving a single, complete 100 GB virtual tape from your archive and reading the contents would cost $12 each time. Remember that this scenario assumes zero compressions; your compression ratios will reduce these results.
Overall, by observing these storage options, it is clear that using amazon S3 provides high availability and durability. Moreover, it can be easily integrated with third-party applications and scales on-demand. However, in terms of performance, EBS remains superior to amazon S3.
The company or business in need of storage platform, Amazon is a trustable and tested solution. One can easily find a suitable solution to fulfill his business needs with so many storage options available at AWS.