How is Volume Gateway different to File Gateway? Is it just volume of data?
I'm having a hard time understanding about iSCSI block storage. What are some examples of how volume gateway is being used?
You can think of File Gateway like a "share folder" that sits in AWS S3. Let say you have an application that generates PDF files into that shared folder, it will eventually it will end up in the AWS S3 bucket.
Volume Gateway on the other hand is like a disk volume (e.g. C: drive) that connects to the operating system, it uses iSCSI protocol, your operating system would treat it like a hard disk that is connected to, but it's located somewhere remotely.
Volume Gateway can operate in 2 modes
Cached mode - your primary data is written to S3 while retaining your frequently accessed data locally in a cache for low-latency access.
Stored mode - your primary data is stored locally and your entire dataset is available for low-latency access while asynchronously backed up to AWS.
Here's a video explaining them
In short:
Volume Gateway can operate in 2 modes:
Stored Mode:
Used for creating backups of local drives
Data is uploaded into S3 as EBS snapshots, so can be used as EBS volumes for EC2
The full copy of the data is stored locally, uploads happen in async mode
Cached Mode:
Can be used for datacenter extension, meaning that a small amount of data is stored locally (cached) while everything else is stored in S3
Although data is stored in S3, this wont be visible in AWS console
In both cases, data is stored raw block state. Volumes are presented to on-prem devices over iSCSI.
File Gateway in the other hand:
Offers mount point for on-prem devices (and EC2) to which we can connect via NFS or SMB
Files are visible from S3 AWS console, File Gateway essentially presents a bucket as a network drive
Multiple entities can connect to a mount point and share files, although there is no object locking
Related
EFS is service provided by AWS for corporate if they want to attach it to multiple ec2 instances. Also it is automatically scale down/up based on the storage. But how is EFS build ? Is it built on EBS? EFS is file level storage, but files also need to be stored on disk in block level(agree object store like S3 its stored differently). So I am not able to capture the difference very well. So EFS data behind the scenes is it stored on EBS?
AWS does not disclose implementation details of their services.
However, if you wish to "capture the difference":
Amazon EBS acts like a Network-attached disk (NAS). It appears as a traditional hard disk and the computer's Operating System is responsible for storing data on the disk, maintaining the directories, handling permissions, etc.
Amazon EFS is a network filesystem (SAN) that is managed by a server. The computer uses a network protocol to send/receive files, but does the Operating System is not responsible for how the data is stored on the disk (that is managed by the server).
Things are getting a little more complicated now that Amazon EBS allows volumes to be mounted on multiple Amazon EC2 computers.
Also, Amazon EBS is stored in only one Availability Zone whereas Amazon EFS filesystems are replicated across Availability Zones.
Summary
Computers (eg Amazon EC2 instances) expect to have a local disk with an operating system and applications. This is the job of Amazon EBS.
Computers on a network that wish to share data want to use a network filesystem. This is the job of Amazon EFS.
Basically, I'm trying to figure out what design to use. I'm collecting 1TB of data per month using an EC2 instance mounted to EBS. I created another Elastic Beanstalk instance serving as the website, and I wanted to figure out if it's better to access this EC2 instance's data through EFS or S3. Also, the amount of data that the elastic beanstalk webpage would access maybe be 10 - 50GB occasionally from a web application.
Basically, it depends upon the type of data you want to store.
EFS - Amazon EFS is automatically scalable - that means that your running applications won't have any problems if the workload suddenly becomes higher - the storage will scale itself automatically. If the workload decreases - the storage will scale down, so you won't pay anything for the storage you don't use. Good for shareable applications and workloads , Faster than S3
S3 - Amazon S3 also allows hosting static website content. provides simple object storage, useful for hosting website images and videos, data analytics, and both mobile and web applications. Object storage manages data as objects, meaning all data types are stored in their native formats.
So I would suggest, as you are collecting 1TB of data and webpage would access 10 - 50GB occasionally, so S3 will make your process (API's) slow and its good the amount of disk space you use, have to pay for that only.
And as you are talking about 1Tb, if data goes beyond that, the disk will be scalable and the application will be highly available.
AWS documentation clearly mentions Gateway Stored Volumes- "This data is asynchronously backed up to S3 in the form of Amazon EBS snapshots."
But there is no mention how the Storage Volume Gateway Cached volumes data is replicated - Aync/Async snapshots ?
The documentation reads
"Cached volumes let you use Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) as your primary data storage while retaining frequently accessed data locally in your storage gateway."
"In the cached volumes solution, AWS Storage Gateway stores all your on-premises application data in a storage volume in Amazon S3. "
Can someone explain
Thanks
In Storage Volume Gateway Cached mode, data is written to S3 and cached locally for frequently accessed files.
Cached volumes let you use Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) as your primary data storage while retaining frequently accessed data locally in your storage 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. You can create storage volumes up to 32 TiB in size and attach to them as iSCSI devices from your on-premises application servers. Your gateway stores data that you write to these volumes in Amazon S3 and retains recently read data in your on-premises storage gateway's cache and upload buffer storage.
Cached volumes can range from 1 GiB to 32 TiB in size and must be rounded to the nearest GiB. Each gateway configured for cached volumes can support up to 32 volumes for a total maximum storage volume of 1,024 TiB (1 PiB).
In the cached volumes solution, AWS Storage Gateway stores all your on-premises application data in a storage volume in Amazon S3.
Cached Volume Architecture
So based on the documentation its asynchronous by nature.
As your applications write data to the storage volumes in AWS, the
gateway initially stores the data on the on-premises disks referred to
as cache storage before uploading the data to Amazon S3. The cache
storage acts as the on-premises durable store for data that is waiting
to upload to Amazon S3 from the upload buffer.
I am new to cloud environment. I do understand the definition and storage types EBS and S3. I wanted to understand the application of EBS as compared to S3.
I do understand EBS looks like a device for heavy though put operations. I cannot find any application where this can be used in comparison to S3. I could think of putting server logs on EBS on magnetic storage, as one EBS can be attached to one instance.
S3 you can use the scaling property to add some heavy data and expand in real time. We can deploy our slef managed dbs on this service.
Please correct me if I am wrong. Please help me understand what is best suited for what and application of them in comparison with one another.
As you stated, they are primarily different types of storage:
Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) is a persistent disk-storage service, which provides storage volumes to a virtual machine (similar to VMDK files in VMWare)
Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) is an object store system that stores files as objects and optionally makes them available across the Internet.
So, how do people choose which to use? It's quite simple... If they need a volume mounted on an Amazon EC2 instance, they need to use Amazon EBS. It gives them a C:, D: drive, etc in Windows and a mountable volume in Linux. Computers traditionally expect to have locally-attached disk storage. Put simply: If the operating system or an application running on an Amazon EC2 instance wants to store data locally, it will use EBS.
EBS Volumes are actually stored on two physical devices in case of failure, but an EBS volume appears as a single volume. The volume size must be selected when the volume is created. The volume exists in a single Availability Zone and can only be attached to EC2 instances in the same Availability Zone. EBS Volumes persist even when the attached EC2 instance is Stopped; when the instance is Started again, the disk remains attached and all data has been presrved.
Amazon S3, however, is something quite different. It is a storage service that allows files to be uploaded/downloaded (PutObject, GetObject) and files are replicated across at least three data centers. Files can optionally be accessed via the Internet via HTTP/HTTPS without requiring a web server. There are no limits on the amount of data that can be stored. Access can be granted per-object, per-bucket via a Bucket Policy, or via IAM Users and Groups.
Amazon S3 is a good option when data needs to be shared (both locally and across the Internet), retained for long periods, backed-up (or even for storing backups) and made accessible to other systems. However, applications need to specifically coded to use Amazon S3 and many traditional application expect to store data on a local drive rather than on a separate storage service.
While Amazon S3 has many benefits, there are still situations where Amazon EBS is a better storage choice:
When using applications that expect to store data locally
For storing temporary files
When applications want to partially update files, because the smallest storage unit in S3 is a file and updating a part of a file requires re-uploading the whole file
For very High-IO situations, such as databases (EBS Provisioned IOPS can provide volumes up to 20,000 IOPS)
For creating volume snapshots as backups
For creating Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) that can be used to boot EC2 instances
Bottom line: They are primarily different types of storage and each have their own usage sweet-spot, just like a Database is a good form of storage depending upon the situation.
I have a website which gets backup from different social media services and then stores the data on server and then that is displayed on my website. content includes, videos, images, and text data.
Currently i am using an EC2 instance with RDS and EBS. Data is stored in EBS Volumes, But as the amount of the data is big enough more than 1 TB and that is increasing. Every time my EBS volume gets filled i attach another volume.
Then i added S3 to my Setup. Cron jobs runs and stores data on S3 and the EC2 instance displays data from the S3. I am using PHP SDK for this purpose.
The problem which i am facing is that the S3 is very slow in my current setup.
Please suggest whether my setup is good or i need some change in my setup and the other way how can i speedup S3. or i should opt some other way to my setup.
EC2 instance is large reserved instance running CentOS.
I have listened some about the S3fs that mount S3 bucket to Ec2 as a volume. Is this a good choice, as when i mounted S3 Bucket to Ec2 instance the transfer rate was very slow.
I am new to the AWS. My users does not access files directly from S3, but they access through my website which is running on EC2 Instance.
RDS is a good choice for storing metadata such as tags, comments and other relevant information about your multimedia files. S3 is good for storing static content such as Video, Audio and Pictures. I think your approach with RDS and S3 is good enough.
EBS backed instances are good for persistence. If you store your metadata on RDS and static content on S3, the only reason why you should use EBS backed EC2 instances is that you have some configuration files which are unversioned right now. If that's not the case, assuming that your configuration is checked into version control and can be pulled on-demand for a fresh instance every time, then you might want to ditch EBS volumes in favor of ephemeral storage. That may give you some performance boost, nothing significant though.
Regarding your concern with S3's latency, yes, S3 is slow. While all your writes may happen directly to S3, I would highly recommend that you set up Amazon CloudFront for your S3 buckets and let your website consume multimedia content from the CloudFront. CloudFront is a Content Delivery Network (CDN) which works with disk volumes (EBS backed or ephemeral) as well as with S3. Setting it up would take not more than a few minutes. CloudFront also supports streaming media files over RTMP. You may need a library like GPAC for hinting multimedia files to make them streamable if not being done already. You might then want to consider creating one distribution for Video/Audio files for streaming and another distribution for Images, Javascript, Stylesheets and other text files.
Hope this helps.
For faster getting and uploading files from Amazon S3 I use batch() found here.
Also you can use cloudfront for faster getting files. I think 9gag uses cloudfront also..