I have some to those terms: Block Level Storage and File Level Storage. Can someone explain why one is better than the other?
Perhaps with examples and algorithmic thinning it would be really interesting to understand.
For example, articles in AWS say that AWS EBS can be use for databases, but why is it better than File Level?
I like to think of it like this:
Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) is block storage. It is just like a USB disk that you plug into your computer. Information is stored in specific blocks on the disk and it is the job of the operating system to keep track of which blocks are used by each file. That's why disk formats vary between Windows and Linux.
Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) is a filesystem that is network-attached storage. It's just like the H: drive (or whatever) that companies provide their employees to store data on a fileserver. You mount the filesystem on your computer like a drive, but your computer sends files to the fileserver rather than managing the block allocation itself.
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is object storage. You give it a file and it stores it as an object. You ask for the object and it gives it back. Amazon S3 is accessed via an API. It is not mounted as a disk. (There are some utilities that can mount S3 as a disk, but they actually just send API calls to the back-end and make it behave like a disk.)
When it comes to modifying files, they behave differently:
Files on block storage (like a USB disk) can be modified by the operating system. For example, changing one byte or adding data to the end of the file.
Files on a filesystem (like the H: drive) can be modified by making a request to the fileserver, much like block storage.
Files in object storage (like S3) are immutable and cannot be modified. You can upload another file with the same name, which will replace the original file, but you cannot modify a file. (Uploaded files are called objects.)
Amazon S3 has other unique attributes, such as making object available via the Internet, offering multiple storage classes for low-cost backups and triggering events when objects are created/deleted. It's a building-block for applications as opposed to a simple disk for storing data. Plus, there is no limit to the amount of data you can store.
Databases
Databases like to store their data in their own format that makes the data fast to access. Traditional databases are built to run on normal servers and they want fast access, so they store their data on directly-attached disks, which are block storage. Amazon RDS uses Amazon EBS for block storage.
A network-attached filesystem would slow the speed of disk access for a database, thereby reducing performance. However, sometimes this trade-off is worthwhile because it is easier to manage network-attached storage (SANs) than to keep adding disks to each individual server.
Some modern 'databases' (if you can use that term) like Presto can access data directly in Amazon S3 without loading the data into the database. Thus, the database processing layer is separated from the data layer. This makes it easier to access historical archived data since it doesn't need to be imported into the database.
Related
let's suppose I have the need to have a NAS-equivalent share on AWS that will replace my on-prem NAS server. I see that both solutions, FSx and S3 File Gateway, allow to have a SMB protocol interface. So they will present themselves to clients in the same way.
Costs would be much smaller using Storage Gateway backed by S3 for large volumes, if slower performance are acceptable. Is this the only difference?
What are the differences, from a practical perspective, to use one solution over the other?
I'm not mentioning the specific use case on purpose, just want to keep the discussion at a general level.
Thanks,
Regards.
FSx is file system service and S3 is objects storage. File Gateway can "trick" your OS to "think" that S3 is a file system, but it isn't.
Try creating s3 bucket & FSx file system, options are very different. If you use it through file gateway, i would look mostly into what happens with data post upload to aws, what will you do next. If it's just a backup and you want to have unlimited space network disk drive attached to your device, i would pick s3.
In s3 you pick storage classes and not worry about capacity, in Fsx you do worry about those things, you pick SSD/HDD, you set capacity, which minimum could be 32Gb, so you over provision by nature of tech. You also have ceilings of how much data you can put into file system device (65536 GiB). I would pick S3 always except when you have some specific requirements for not picking S3 to store data while it has perfect lifecycle, storage class, versioning, security built in and it's true cloud serverless service with all the peace of mind that it just works and you don't run to traditional issues like out of disk space.
Suppose you have to implement video streaming platform from scratch. It doesn't matter where you gonna store metadata, your not-very-popular video files will be stored at file system, or object store in case you want to use Cloud. If you'll choose AWS, in order to boost AWS S3 read performance, you can make multiple read requests against the same video file, see Performance Guidelines for Amazon S3:
You can use concurrent connections to Amazon S3 to fetch different
byte ranges from within the same object. This helps you achieve higher
aggregate throughput versus a single whole-object request.
In the same time, as you know, disk I/O is sequential for all HDD/SDD drives, so to boost read performance (if neglect RAM necessary for uncompress/decrypt each video chunk) you have to read from multiple disks (YouTube use RAID).
Why S3 will have better performance on concurrent byte range requests agains the same file? Isn't it stored on single disk? I suppose S3 may have some replication factor and still store the file on multiple disks, does it?
Background
We have developed an e-commerce application where I want to use CDN to improve the speed of the app and also to reduce the load on the host.
The application is hosted on an EC2 server and now we are going to use Cloud Front.
Questions
After reading a lot of articles and documents, I have created a distribution for my sample site. After doing all the experience I have come to know the following things. I want to be sure if am right about these points or not.
When we create a distribution it takes all the accessible data from the given origin path. We don't need to copy/ sync our files to cloud front.
We just have to change the path of our application according to this distribution CNAME (if cname is given).
There is no difference between placing the images/js/CSS files on S3 or on our own host. Cloud Front will just take them by itself.
The application will have thousands of pictures of the products, should we place them on S3 or its ok if they are on the host itself? Please share any good article to understand the difference of both the techniques.
Because if S3 is significantly better then I'll have to make a program to sync all such data on S3.
Thanks for the help.
Some reasons to store the images on Amazon S3 rather than your own host (and then serve them via Amazon CloudFront):
Less load on your servers
Even though content is cached in Amazon CloudFront, your servers will still be hit with requests for the first access of each object from every edge location (each edge location maintains its own cache), repeated every time that the object expires. (Refreshes will generate a HEAD request, and will only re-download content that has changed or been flushed from the cache.)
More durable storage
Amazon S3 keeps copies of your data across multiple Availability Zones within the same Region. You could also replicate data between your servers to improve durability but then you would need to manage the replication and pay for storage on every server.
Lower storage cost
Storing data on Amazon S3 is lower cost than storing it on Amazon EBS volumes. If you are planning on keeping your data in both locations, then obviously using S3 is more expensive but you should also consider storing it only on S3, which makes it lower cost, more durable and less for you to backup on your server.
Reasons to NOT use S3:
More moving parts -- maintaining code to move files to S3
Not as convenient as using a local file system
Having to merge log files from S3 and your own servers to gather usage information
I have a number of large (100GB-400GB) files stored on various EBS volumes in AWS. I need to have local copies of these files for offline use. I am wary to attempt to scp such files down from AWS considering their size. I've considered cutting the files up into smaller pieces and reassembling them once they all successfully arrive. But I wonder if there is a better way. Any thoughts?
There are multiple ways, here are some:
Copy your files to S3 and download them from there. S3 has a lot more support in the backend for downloading files (It's handled by Amazon)
Use rsync instead of scp. rsync is a bit more reliable than scp and you can resume your downloads.
rsync -azv remote-ec2-machine:/dir/iwant/to/copy /dir/where/iwant/to/put/the/files
Create a private torrent for your files. If your using Linux mktorrent is a good utility you can use: http://mktorrent.sourceforge.net/
Here is one more option you can consider if you are wanting to transfer large amounts of data:
AWS Import/Export is a service that accelerates transferring data into and out of AWS using physical storage appliances, bypassing the Internet. AWS Import/Export Disk was originally the only service offered by AWS for data transfer by mail. Disk supports transfers data directly onto and off of storage devices you own using the Amazon high-speed internal network.
Basically from what I understand, you send amazon your HDD and they will copy the data onto it for you and send it back.
As far as I know this is only available in USA but it might have been expanded to other regions.
We store some sensitive stuff on S3 and on our instance filesystems on AWS. Is there a way to securely wipe it?
The short answer is no, there is no wipe utility. If you delete the file permanently, the file is gone and it cannot be recovered (unless you have snapshots or other items that might keep the file stored). However, there is not a way to wipe the disk. Don't forget, though, that AWS uses server virtualization so that your disk storage does not necessarily correspond to one physical disk platter. Instead, it is a virtual storage system spread over many drives. When your file is deleted, it is gone from public access. Then Amazon designates that area of disk for write-only operations so that your data gets overwritten quickly.
Here is a quote from an Amazon document about their data security:
When an object is deleted from Amazon S3, removal of the mapping from the public name to the object starts immediately, and is generally processed across the distributed system within several seconds. Once the mapping is removed, there is no external access to the deleted object. That storage area is then made available only for write operations and the data is overwritten by newly stored data.
Retrieved from: http://aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/overview-of-security-processes/