My goal is to have a s3 backed storage gateway available as a disk on a digitalocean droplet. By watching the video's about storage gateway (e.g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QaCfOatTIDA&t=136s) it seems like it is possible
But I am quite confused by the options available when I go about configuring aws storage gateway. I dont understand which of these options I should choose
Is there any guide available on how to make aws cloud storage available for a VPS on a different cloud provider?
My digitalocean droplet is an Ubuntu 20.04 if that matters
Usually you would use fuse to "mount" S3 in your linux OS. Most notably, this can be easily done using s3fs:
s3fs allows Linux and macOS to mount an S3 bucket via FUSE. s3fs preserves the native object format for files, allowing use of other tools like AWS CLI.
I am new to AWS infrastructure, I would like to know what storage mechanism should I use which can be accessible by my war (hosted in AWS elasticbeanstalk) and one windows service hosted on one of my AWS machine. I have little knowledge about S3, EBS and EFS.
Use Case:
my webapp in elasticbeanstalk would like to create objects in some storage system.
my executable on one of aws machine produces files that should be accessible by my webapp deployed in elasticbeanstalk
Questions:
Is it possible to share some storage to both my webapp and my executable.
If answer of 1 is yes, What storage mechanism should I use ?
Please advise.
S3 is Simple Storage Service that is reachable through a web interface. I reckon this is what you are looking for. It is reachable through an URL and is used for storing objects such as files, images, and so on.
EBS is a virtual hard disk that is connected to an EC2 instance (virtual machine).
EFS is Elastic File System used for Linux.
https://aws.amazon.com/s3/
If full hierarchical file system is not needed and you need to store plain object which seems to be the case according to use case given by you then Amazon s3 is the way to go.
Amazon EBS is the block storage service that can only be attached to one machine it resembles the physical hardisk attached to your home computer for more information read this.
EBS
Amazon EFS stands for elastic file system its also a block storage service, its different from EBS in terms that it can be shared accross multiple machines, it resembles the NAS in a datacenter. for more information on EFS read this.
EFS
I have about 35 gb of photos in my amazon cloud drive. I'm trying to run a convolutional neural network using the Deep Learning Linux EC2 AMI on AWS. Is there a way I could use the images in my amazon cloud drive for this purposes? Maybe access them in my python script or something?
Or is there another way of storing the 35 gb of data to be able to be used with AWS?
Interesting question and I could visualize use-case for the same. Note that S3 is in ideal location for enterprise use-cases while Amazon Drive is alternative of Google drive and is more towards customer focussed a b2c solution... Primary purpose of Amazon Drive is to let photos/documents be in sync across different devices of customer and secondly, auto upload of photos taken.
Having said that, ofcourse u can use S3 to store your images and then you have many sdks in all languages through which your ec2 can interact with s3.
But if you want to use amazon drive; you can refer https://developer.amazon.com/public/apis/experience/cloud-drive/content/restful-api
Note that as S3 is focussed towards enterprise; you have loads of options and easy apis as compared to with amazon drive.. You can also try uploading images to Google drive.. they have much better apis and your ec2 can talk to google drive apis.
You cannot access Amazon Cloud Drive. Amazon does not provide public access to its only API. Amazon Cloud Drive does not have WebDav or (S)FTP, the only supported API is poorly documented REST API. And Amazon does not authorize API keys anymore for at least a year.
Even if you got whitelisted access key year ago or earlier, API and service itself are so awkward and buggy that you get more problems than solve them. Constant TooManyRequests errors even if you didnt send any request for whole day, wierd undocumented errors.
I have a service hosted on Amazon Web Services. There I have multiple EC2 instances running with the exact same setup and data, managed by an Elastic Load Balancer and scaling groups.
Those instances are web servers running web applications based on PHP. So currently there are the very same files etc. placed on every instance. But when the ELB / scaling group launches a new instance based on load rules etc., the files might not be up-to-date.
Additionally, I'd rather like to use a shared file system for PHP sessions etc. than sticky sessions.
So, my question is, for those reasons and maybe more coming up in the future, I would like to have a shared file system entity which I can attach to my EC2 instances.
What way would you suggest to resolve this? Are there any solutions offered by AWS directly so I can rely on their services rather than doing it on my on with a DRBD and so on? What is the easiest approach? DRBD, NFS, ...? Is S3 also feasible for those intends?
Thanks in advance.
As mentioned in a comment, AWS has announced EFS (http://aws.amazon.com/efs/) a shared network file system. It is currently in very limited preview, but based on previous AWS services I would hope to see it generally available in the next few months.
In the meantime there are a couple of third party shared file system solutions for AWS such as SoftNAS https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B00PJ9FGVU/ref=srh_res_product_title?ie=UTF8&sr=0-3&qid=1432203627313
S3 is possible but not always ideal, the main blocker being it does not natively support any filesystem protocols, instead all interactions need to be via an AWS API or via http calls. Additionally when looking at using it for session stores the 'eventually consistent' model will likely cause issues.
That being said - if all you need is updated resources, you could create a simple script to run either as a cron or on startup that downloads the files from s3.
Finally in the case of static resources like css/images don't store them on your webserver in the first place - there are plenty of articles covering the benefit of storing and accessing static web resources directly from s3 while keeping the dynamic stuff on your server.
From what we can tell at this point, EFS is expected to provide basic NFS file sharing on SSD-backed storage. Once available, it will be a v1.0 proprietary file system. There is no encryption and its AWS-only. The data is completely under AWS control.
SoftNAS is a mature, proven advanced ZFS-based NAS Filer that is full-featured, including encrypted EBS and S3 storage, storage snapshots for data protection, writable clones for DevOps and QA testing, RAM and SSD caching for maximum IOPS and throughput, deduplication and compression, cross-zone HA and a 100% up-time SLA. It supports NFS with LDAP and Active Directory authentication, CIFS/SMB with AD users/groups, iSCSI multi-pathing, FTP and (soon) AFP. SoftNAS instances and all storage is completely under your control and you have complete control of the EBS and S3 encryption and keys (you can use EBS encryption or any Linux compatible encryption and key management approach you prefer or require).
The ZFS filesystem is a proven filesystem that is trusted by thousands of enterprises globally. Customers are running more than 600 million files in production on SoftNAS today - ZFS is capable of scaling into the billions.
SoftNAS is cross-platform, and runs on cloud platforms other than AWS, including Azure, CenturyLink Cloud, Faction cloud, VMware vSPhere/ESXi, VMware vCloud Air and Hyper-V, so your data is not limited or locked into AWS. More platforms are planned. It provides cross-platform replication, making it easy to migrate data between any supported public cloud, private cloud, or premise-based data center.
SoftNAS is backed by industry-leading technical support from cloud storage specialists (it's all we do), something you may need or want.
Those are some of the more noteworthy differences between EFS and SoftNAS. For a more detailed comparison chart:
https://www.softnas.com/wp/nas-storage/softnas-cloud-aws-nfs-cifs/how-does-it-compare/
If you are willing to roll your own HA NFS cluster, and be responsible for its care, feeding and support, then you can use Linux and DRBD/corosync or any number of other Linux clustering approaches. You will have to support it yourself and be responsible for whatever happens.
There's also GlusterFS. It does well up to 250,000 files (in our testing) and has been observed to suffer from an IOPS brownout when approaching 1 million files, and IOPS blackouts above 1 million files (according to customers who have used it). For smaller deployments it reportedly works reasonably well.
Hope that helps.
CTO - SoftNAS
For keeping your webserver sessions in sync you can easily switch to Redis or Memcached as your session handler. This is a simple setting in the PHP.ini and they can all access the same Redis or Memcached server to do sessions. You can use Amazon's Elasticache which will manage the Redis or Memcache instance for you.
http://phpave.com/redis-as-a-php-session-handler/ <- explains how to setup Redis with PHP pretty easily
For keeping your files in sync is a little bit more complicated.
How to I push new code changes to all my webservers?
You could use Git. When you deploy you can setup multiple servers and it will push your branch (master) to the multiple servers. So every new build goes out to all webserver.
What about new machines that launch?
I would setup new machines to run a rsync script from a trusted source, your master web server. That way they sync their web folders with the master when they boot and would be identical even if the AMI had old web files in it.
What about files that change and need to be live updated?
Store any user uploaded files in S3. So if user uploads a document on Server 1 then the file is stored in s3 and location is stored in a database. Then if a different user is on server 2 he can see the same file and access it as if it was on server 2. The file would be retrieved from s3 and served to the client.
GlusterFS is also an open source distributed file system used by many to create shared storage across EC2 instances
Until Amazon EFS hits production the best approach in my opinion is to build a storage backend exporting NFS from EC2 instances, maybe using Pacemaker/Corosync to achieve HA.
You could create an EBS volume that stores the files and instruct Pacemaker to umount/dettach and then attach/mount the EBS volume to the healthy NFS cluster node.
Hi we currently use a product called SoftNAS in our AWS environment. It allows us to chooses between both EBS and S3 backed storage. It has built in replication as well as a high availability option. May be something you can check out. I believe they offer a free trial you can try out on AWS
We are using ObjectiveFS and it is working well for us. It uses S3 for storage and is straight forward to set up.
They've also written a doc on how to share files between EC2 instances.
http://objectivefs.com/howto/how-to-share-files-between-ec2-instances
All right, I am pretty newbie to network and storage things, but in my research, we need to use AWS S3 to backup data, sounds simple enough!
So I follow the "AWS storage gateway user guide (API version 2013-06-30).
Below are details I could provide based on my best knowledge:
Gateway-cached
Gateway on-premises, using VMware ESXi Hypervisor
About 300 Gb cache and 150 upload buffer
And
AWS gateway is deployed and activated
Cache storage and upload buffer configured on VM
A volume in Amazon S3 is created.
After all the above completed, I tried to use my Windows 8 iSCSI to connect to VM. It shows as a disk in folder, so I did a initial formatting. But after this, it asks for formatting again.
I followed the guide, but unfortunately it didn't work for me this time. Could anyone provide any insight on this issue? Thanks very much in advance.
It turns out that I don't understand how iSCSI works.
Quoted from Amazon Storage Gateway User Guide:
Each of your storage volumes is exposed as an iSCSI target. Connect only one iSCSI initiator to each iSCSI target
Since I thought iSCSI target as a network shared drive, I let multiple machine connect to the iSCSI target, resulting keeping asking for formatting.