Storage Gateway

AWS Storage Gateway is a hybrid cloud storage service that gives you on-premises access to virtually unlimited cloud storage. Customers use Storage Gateway to simplify storage management and reduce costs for key hybrid cloud storage use cases. These include moving tape backups to the cloud, reducing on-premises storage with cloud-backed file shares, providing low latency access to data in AWS for on-premises applications, as well as various migration, archiving, processing, and disaster recovery use cases.

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AWS Storage Gateway Features

AWS Storage Gateway connects an on-premises software appliance with cloud-based storage to provide seamless integration with data security features between your on-premises IT environment and the AWS storage infrastructure.
It provides low-latency performance by maintaining frequently accessed data on-premises while securely storing all of your data encrypted in Amazon S3 or Amazon Glacier.
For disaster recovery scenarios, AWS Storage Gateway, together with Amazon EC2, can serve as a cloud-hosted solution that mirrors your entire production environment.
Customers can download the AWS Storage Gateway software appliance as a virtual machine (VM) image that they install on a host in their data center or as an EC2 instance.
Gateway-cached volumes minimize the need to scale your on-premises storage infrastructure while still providing your applications with low-latency access to their frequently accessed data.
Gateway-stored volumes store primary data locally, while asynchronously backing up that data to AWS. These volumes provide on-premises applications with low-latency access to their entire datasets, while providing durable, off-site backups.
A gateway-VTL allows customers to perform offline data archiving by presenting their existing backup application with an iSCSI-based virtual tape library consisting of a virtual media changer and virtual tape drives.

Volume Gateway

A volume gateway provides cloud-backed storage volumes that customers can mount as Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI) devices from their on-premises application servers.

The volume gateway is deployed into your on-premises environment as a VM running on VMware ESXi, KVM, or Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor.
Data written to these volumes can be asynchronously backed up as point-in-time snapshots of your volumes, and stored in the cloud as Amazon EBS snapshots.

When connecting to the Volume Gateway with the iSCSI block interface, The gateway uses two modes configurations: cached and stored.

Cached volumes:– Customers store their primary data in Amazon S3 and retain your frequently accessed data locally in cache.
Stored volumes:– Customers store their entire data set locally, while making an asynchronous copy of your volume in Amazon S3 and point-in-time EBS snapshots.
Customers often choose the volume gateway to backup local applications, and use it for disaster recovery based on EBS Snapshots, or Cached Volume Clones.
The Volume Gateway integration with AWS Backup enables customers to use the AWS Backup service to protect on-premises applications that use Storage Gateway volumes.
Using AWS Backup with Volume Gateway helps centralize backup management, reduce operational burden, and meet compliance requirements.

Tape Gateway

A tape gateway provides cloud-backed virtual tape storage. The tape gateway is deployed into on-premises environment as a VM running on VMware ESXi, KVM, or Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor.

The Tape Gateway presents itself to existing backup application as an industry-standard iSCSI-based virtual tape library (VTL), consisting of a virtual media changer and virtual tape drives.
Tape gateway is a cost-effective and durable archive backup data if it used in GLACIER or DEEP_ARCHIVE. A tape gateway provides a virtual tape infrastructure that scales seamlessly with your business needs and eliminates the operational burden of provisioning, scaling, and maintaining a physical tape infrastructure.
Existing backup applications and workflows can be while writing to a nearly limitless collection of virtual tapes.
It can be used to run AWS Storage Gateway either on-premises as a VM appliance, as a hardware appliance, or in AWS as an Amazon EC2 instance.
It can be used as a gateways hosted on EC2 instances for disaster recovery, data mirroring, and providing storage for applications hosted on Amazon EC2.

File Gateway

A file gateway supports a file interface into Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and combines a service and a virtual software appliance. The File Gateway presents a file interface that enables customers to store files as objects in Amazon S3 using the industry-standard NFS and SMB file protocols, and access those files via NFS and SMB from your datacenter or Amazon EC2, or access those files as objects with the S3 API.

POSIX-style metadata, including ownership, permissions, and timestamps are durably stored in Amazon S3 in the user-metadata of the object associated with the file.
Once objects are transferred to S3, they can be managed as native S3 objects, and bucket policies such as versioning, lifecycle management, and cross-region replication and apply directly to objects stored in the bucket.
The gateway provides access to objects in S3 as files or file share mount points, which enables customers to perform;
- Store and retrieve files directly using the NFS version 3 or 4.1 protocol.
- Store and retrieve files directly using the SMB file system version, 2 and 3 protocol.
- Access data directly in Amazon S3 from any AWS Cloud application or service.
- Manage Amazon S3 data using lifecycle policies, cross-region replication, and versioning.
A file gateway simplifies file storage in Amazon S3, integrates to existing applications and provides a cost-effective alternative to on-premises storage.
It provides low-latency access to data through transparent local caching. A file gateway manages data transfer to and from AWS, buffers applications from network congestion, optimizes and streams data in parallel, and manages bandwidth consumption.

EC2 Instance Storage

Amazon EC2 instance store volumes also called ephemeral drives, provide temporary block-level storage for many EC2 instance types.This storage consists of a preconfigured and pre-attached block of disk storage on the same physical server that hosts the EC2 instance for which the block provides storage. The amount of the disk storage provided varies by EC2 instance type. In the EC2 instance families that provide instance storage, larger instances tend to provide both more and larger instance store volumes.

Instance store is ideal for temporary storage of information that changes frequently, such as buffers, caches, scratch data, and other temporary content, or for data that is replicated across a fleet of instances, such as a load-balanced pool of web servers.
Some instance types, such as the micro instances (t1, t2) and the Compute-optimized c4 instances, use EBS storage only with no instance storage provided.
Instances using Amazon EBS for the root device don’t expose the instance store volumes by default.
AWS clients can choose to expose the instance store volumes at instance launch time by specifying a block device mapping.

Amazon EC2 local instance store volumes are not intended to be used as durable disk storage. Unlike Amazon EBS volume data, data on instance store volumes persists only during the life of the associated EC2 instance.

This functionality means that data on instance store volumes is persistent across orderly instance reboots, but if the EC2 instance is stopped and restarted, terminates, or fails, all data on the instance store volumes will be lost.
Don’t use local instance store volumes for any data that must persist over time, such as permanent file or database storage, without providing data persistence by replicating data or periodically copying data to durable storage such as Amazon EBS or Amazon S3.

The number and storage capacity of Amazon EC2 local instance store volumes are fixed and defined by the instance type. Although it can’t increased or decreased the number of instance store volumes on a single EC2 instance, the storage is still scalable and elastic;

That means customers can scale the total amount of instance store up or down by increasing or decreasing the number of running EC2 instances.
To achieve full storage elasticity, include one of the other suitable storage options, such as Amazon S3, Amazon EFS, or Amazon EBS, in your Amazon EC2 storage strategy.

Instance store volumes can only be mounted and accessed by the EC2 instances they belong to. When an instance stopped or terminated , the applications and data in its instance store are erased, so no other instance can have access to the instance store in the future.

EC2 local instance store volumes are ideal for temporary storage of information that is continually changing, such as buffers, caches, scratch data, and other temporary content, or for data that is replicated across a fleet of instances, such as a load-balanced pool of web servers.

This storage can only be used from a single EC2 instance during that instance’s lifetime. Unlike EBS volumes, instance store volumes cannot be detached or attached to another instance.
For high I/O and high storage, use EC2 instance storage targeted to these use cases. High I/O instances (the i2 family) provide instance store volumes backed by SSD and are ideally suited for many high-performance database workloads.
Applications using instance storage for persistent data generally provide data durability through replication, or by periodically copying data to durable storage.
You should not use local instance store volumes for any data that must persist over time, such as permanent file or database storage, without providing data persistence by replicating data or periodically copying data to durable storage such as Amazon EBS or Amazon S3.

Since EC2 instance virtual machine and the local instance store volumes are located on the same physical server, interaction with this storage is very fast, particularly for sequential access. To increase aggregate IOPS, or to improve sequential disk throughput, multiple instance store volumes can be grouped together using RAID 0 (disk striping) software.

The SSD instance store volumes in EC2 high I/O instances provide from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of low-latency, random 4 KB random IOPS.
The instance store volumes in EC2 high-storage instances provide very high storage density and high sequential read and write performance.