AWS S3 vs EBS vs EFS

Yogendra H J
3 min readMay 16, 2021

Choosing the best storage option plays a major role in the performance you receive, as well as the costs you will expend. This blog will give you insights into the various storage options AWS provides.

We will explore the differences between Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) and, Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) and, understand each solution’s unique benefits and uses. This will make it easier to pick the best solution to support your business objectives and storage needs.

AWS S3 - Simple Storage Service is object-level storage that is preferred when you want the data to be written once and read many times (WORM). S3 is scalable, need not plan the size, and resides at the regional level where its names are global and unique.

S3 is not suitable for hosting OS or Database, can be used for hosting a Static website where data is written once and read many times and can be accessed across the world.

AWS S3 use cases: 1) Data lake and big data analytics. 2) Backup and restoration. 3) Reliable disaster recovery. 4) Methodical archiving.

Read more about AWS S3 in my previous blog https://yogendrahj.medium.com/aws-s3-for-absolute-beginners-a8cd637d0f3e.

AWS EBS - Elastic Block Store is block-level storage that is attached as a drive for your virtual machines. It stores data in equally-sized blocks and organizes them into a hierarchy similar to a traditional file system. The volumes are provisioned in size and attached to EC2 instances in a way that’s similar to the local disk drive on a physical machine.

EBS works best at server disks, it is persistent and high-performance in terms of reading and writing, replicated within AZ, and could be mounted to one EC2 in the same AZ.

AWS EBS use cases: 1) Testing and development. 2) NoSQL databases. 3) Relational databases. 4) Business consistency. 5) Enterprise-wide applications.

AWS EFS- Elastic File System provides a simple, serverless, set-and-forget, elastic file system that lets you share file data without provisioning or managing storage. It can be used with AWS Cloud services and on-premises resources and is built to scale on-demand to petabytes without disrupting applications. We can consider it as NFS in an on-premises environment.

It is replicated across AZ’s in a region, could be mounted to the on-premises server using VPN or DirectConnect, could be mounted to multiple EC2 at the same time and no sizing to be done.

Amazon EFS offers you the choice of creating file systems using Standard or One Zone storage classes. Standard storage classes store data within and across multiple availability zones (AZ). One Zone storage classes store data redundantly within a single AZ, at a 47% lower price compared to file systems using Standard storage classes, for workloads that don’t require multi-AZ resilience.

AWS EFS use cases: 1)Lift-and-shift application support. 2) Analytics for big data. 3) Content management system and web server support. 4) Application development and testing.

Read the AWS official documentation here https://docs.aws.amazon.com/s3/index.html, https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/AmazonEBS.htmland https://aws.amazon.com/efs/.

Content and information credits: missioncloud.com and KnowledgeIndia youtube channel.

I am happy to hear your feedback, suggestions, requests on any topics in my coming blogs.

LEARN and BE CURIOUS!!!!!

Happy Learning,

Yogendra

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Yogendra H J

Learning and Sharing knowledge || Cloud Computing evangelist || AWS SAPro || Azure Admin || Exploring DevOps