#Aws ephemeral storage how to#

#Aws ephemeral storage how to#

How does one choose the best storage option for a given storage need? There is no end to the amount of information and documentation on AWS storage products, but I have seldom seen a 30,000 foot view of how to go about initially selecting a product all in one place. AWS offers at least 6 different datastore products:Ģ) Instance Store (ephemeral EC2 storage) a certain elapsed “expiry” time passing.Moving to Amazon Web Services offers a dizzying array of new capabilities, and the pace of innovation on the AWS platform is hard to keep pace with for the average user.

S3 and Glacier play very nicely together because you can set up Lifecycles for S3 objects which cause them to be moved to Glacier after a certain trigger e.g.

Instead of getting instant access to files, you have to make a retrieval request and wait a number of hours. Instead of a bucket, Glacier files are stored in a Vault. For example old backups, old data only kept for compliance purposes. Glacier comes next as basically a variant on S3 where you expect to want to view the files either hardly ever or never again. S3 integrates extremely will with the CloudFront content distribution service which offers caching of content to a much more globally distributed set of edge locations (thus improving performance and saving bandwidth costs). for a web site, input or output data files (like you’ve use an SFTP site), or anything that you’d treat like a file.Īn S3 store is called a bucket whilst living in one specified global region, has a globally unique name. S3 is instead for storing things like your EC2 server images (Amazon Machine Images aka AMIs), static content e.g. It is possible to attach a storage volume created and stored in S3 to an EC2 instance, but this is no longer recommended (EBS is preferable). S3 is a cloud file storage service more akin to DropBox or GoogleDrive. One other thing to know about EBS is that you can pay extra money for what is known as provisioned IOPS which means guaranteed (and very high if you like) disk read and write speeds. backed up in away that you can create a new identical device and attach that to the same or another EC2 instance. They can be set to persist after an instance is restarted. Some larger more expensive instance types come with SSD instance storage for higher performance.Įlastic Block Store (EBS) is a service where you buy devices more akin to a hard disk that can be attached to one (and only one -at the time of writing) EC2 instance. Micro-sized instance types (low specification servers) don’t have ephemeral storage. You can store the Operating System on there if nothing important gets stored there after the instance is started (and bootstrapping completes). Naturally this makes it suitable for temporary storage, but nothing that needs to survive something as simple as a reboot. Instance (aka ephemeral, aka local) storage is a device like a RAM disk physically attached to your server (your EC2 instance) and characteristically it gets completely wiped every reboot.