Day 18 of AWS 100 Days of AWS: The Ultimate Storage Showdown: S3 vs. EBS vs. EFS.
Welcome to Day 19! We are also uniting the main storage services to provide an answer to one of the most frequently asked questions about an AWS architecture: what storage service should I use? Knowledge of the inherent differences between S3, EBS and EFS is an essential skill.
The Question
A company runs a fleet of EC2 instances that all need to access and modify a shared set of files simultaneously. This setup is similar to a traditional Network Attached Storage (NAS) or a shared network drive.
Which AWS storage service is designed for this specific "many-to-one" use case?
The Correct Answer
The right solution is (C) Amazon EFS (Elastic File System).
Why It Is Right: The Cloud-based Shared Network Drive.
Amazon EFS is a file storage service that is managed and available at scale. This is its distinguishing characteristic because you can build a file system that can be mounted and accessed by thousands of EC2 instances (or other AWS services) at the same time.
Having a single instance write a change in a file on the EFS volume makes the change immediately visible to all the other instances that access the same file. This is precisely how a conventional on-premises Network Attached Storage (NAS) apparatus functions, and this is how EFS is ideal in applications such as shared code repositories, content administration frameworks, and web serving.
The Grand Analogy: A Personal Notebook vs. a Library Book vs. a Whiteboard.
EBS resembles a personal notebook. It is owned by a single individual (your EC2 instance). You can write in it and carry with you (it is persistent) yet only you can use it at the same time.
The storage of S3 is similar to the archive of a large public library. The number of books that can be stored is practically unlimited. Anyone having a library card (URL/permissions) can take out a copy, although not everyone is allowed to write in the same master book simultaneously.
EFS is a collective white board within a conference room. The room can have many people (your EC2 instances) and they are all able to write and read the whiteboard at the same time.
Evaluation of the Flaws of Choices.
(A) Amazon S3: S3 is object storage. It is neither a file system that can be mounted to the operating system of an EC2 instance, nor is it intended to support the low-latency, concurrent file changes needed in this case.
(B) Amazon EBS: EBS is a block storage, such as a hard drive. Only one EC2 instance can be attached to an EBS volume in a single Availability Zone at any moment (Note: multi-attach is supported but only when used in very specific workloads that are clustered). It is impossible to make it a mere common impulse of a group of instances.
EC2 Instance Store (D): This is temporary block storage that is physically connected to a single EC2 instance. It is not persistence and can not be shared.
Keywords
- S3 vs EBS vs EFS
- AWS Storage Types
- Amazon EFS (Elastic File System)
- File Storage vs Block Storage vs Object Storage
- AWS Shared Storage
- Network Attached Storage (NAS)
- EC2 Storage Options
- Concurrent Access
- Data Persistence
- Cloud File System
- "when to use efs over s3"
- "aws shared file system for ec2 instances"
- "can multiple ec2 instances mount the same ebs volume"
- "aws storage services comparison guide"
- "use cases for amazon efs"
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