Lec 05-1: Intro to Amazon S3

Introduction to Cloud Storage

• On Premises storage: Data are shared through your local network
• Cloud storage: Data are shared through the internet -> outside service provider like AWS hosts your data

Benefits of Cloud Storage

• Cost efficient: no huge up-front fee
• Secure: data is saved across multiple servers
• Accessible: multiple users can access
• Scalable
• Managed: cloud service provider manages the server
• Backed up: copies of data are stored in different physical locations

Type of Cloud Storage

Block Storage

• Breaks up data into fixed-sized blocks and then stores those blocks as separate pieces
• usually used as root volume
• use cases: fast, high-throughput, low-latency

File Storage

• Access data in a shared file system

Object Storage

• Files are stored as objects (data + metadata + object key)
• use cases: static-files for website, disaster recovery

AWS Core Storage Services

• Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS): block-storage device designed for EC2
• Amazon Elastic File System (EFS): elastic file system
• Simple Storage Service (S3): object storage service that stores data as objects within buckets

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Introduction to Amazon S3

• Amazon S3 store objects inside buckets within the Region of your choice
  • bucket: container for object

Amazon S3 Physical Architecture

• When you provision S3, you choose the Region
• If you upload to S3, objects are automatically replicated across a minimum of three Availability Zones
  • Each AZs is physically separated
  • If one AZ fails, your file exists and is available in another AZ in the same Region
• for durability and availability

Benefits of Amazon S3

• Scalability
  • bucket size automatically increase
• Data durability and availability
  • Durability: measure of the average annual expected loss of objects
  • Availability: amount of time per year that an object is available for retrieval
• Performance
• Security

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Basic S3 workflow

• S3 accepts all of file types
• There is no limit to the amount of data == bucket size is unlimited
• But, individual objects must be less than 5TB
• Each object has a unique identifier

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Object-level storage

• Object = data + metadata + key (identifier)
• Objects are stored in a bucket, the combination of a bucket name, key, and versionID uniquely identifies the object
• Object storage requires a simple HTTP API
• Object storage systems are typically layred over existing file systems

Example: Dropbox

• The file system runs at application level
• moving a file doesn't means that it moves actual blocks for the file -> user view as if the file is moved

Active and Archive Storage

Object storage can be classified by how often you must access your data

 

Active Storage

• For data that you use all the time
• Data that you access less frequently, but it is important that the data can be accessed quickly
  ex) files for a static website

Archive Storage

• For data that you rarely access but must be maintained
  ex) data for compliance or business continuity operations

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Amazon S3 storage classes

Amazon S3 Standard

• General purpose, frequently used data
• Websites that only include static content

Amazon S3 Standard - Infrequent Access

• Backups of your systems
• Files that are rarely accessed but must be quickly accessed if needed (highly available)

Amazon S3 One Zone - Infrequent Access

• Storage for cross-Region replication backups from other S3 buckets
• Off-site storage of coppies of on-premises backups

Amazon S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval

• Storage of long-term backups
• Digital media asset archive for large media files
• Can retrieve in about 5 minutes

Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive

• Long-term data libraries
• Archives or datasets that must be retained for compliance purposes
• Can retrieve in about 12 hours

Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering

• Unpredictable, unknown, rapidly changing workloads

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Amazon S3 Costs

• Pricing depends on the storage class and the features:
  • GB per month
  • Transfers OUT to other Regions or the internet
  • PUT, COPY, POST, LIST, and GET requests
• Doen't cost money
  • Transfer IN to Amazon S3
  • Transfer btw S3 buckets in the same Region
  • Transfer OUT to Amazon EC2 or CloudFront in the same Region
  • DELETE and CANCEL requests

Free Tier

• 5GB of Amazon S3 for the first 12 months
• 20,000 GET requests
• 2,000 PUT, COPY, POST, or LIST requests
• 100 GB of data transfer out