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.
Related
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
My java servlet web app is hosted in AWS EC2 instance. Is storing sensitive data (say db credentials) in my property (config) file of my java web app safe? When the EBS volumn is deallocated, will it contain the data I saved and used by someone else with in the same/different AWS account? Are there any security risks?
Data stored on the EBS volume is zeroed out after you delete the volume. This is carried out by AWS automatically.
Yes, the blocks on the EBS volume will be zeroed after you delete the volume.
From Amazon EBS volumes - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud:
The data persists on the volume until the volume is deleted explicitly. The physical block storage used by deleted EBS volumes is overwritten with zeroes before it is allocated to another account. If you are dealing with sensitive data, you should consider encrypting your data manually or storing the data on a volume protected by Amazon EBS encryption.
For more information on EBS encryption, see Amazon EBS encryption - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
I went with another approach considering the reason that anyone who has access to the file (via remote or someway) can read and pass it across. I used AWS systems manager (param store) to store the sensitive values as secure string. App retrieves it from param store and use it at run time. To reduce multiple hits, the value is cached for a configurable time. The original question is about the security of EBS and not about the alternate. However sharing my approach to let someone aware the alternate.
I have aws setup for my website, What I am doing is when a user uploads an image , we are saving it to a folder on ec2 and then transferring it to s3, post which we are fetching images from s3.
I have also stored all the js and css on ec2 and fetching all from ec2 itself.
My data transfer cost is very high now, Please suggest if storing images on ec2 is costing me more ? should I directly store it on s3?
Always think of using CDN or dedicated web hosting services if your web traffics is high. EC2 are only recommended for back-office processing usage than serving web page. There is no free lunch in AWS if you are not careful. You must always check AWS bandwidth pricing before you want to host anything inside AWS. In certain extend, the data transfer costs can be many time more expensive than the EC2 server and (s3, EBS) storage.
AWS only give EC2 1 GB free data transfer to the Internet. After that, it is $0.09/GB. If you open your web server to everyone and 20 bots go download 100GB data daily from your EC2 web server, you will get a hefty bill, i.e. (100GB x $0.09 x 30days = $270 ) - $0.09 (Free 1GB) = $269.01
Also remember, S3 data transfer out to internet is NOT FREE. You only get free unlimited data transfer from S3 to your EC2/lambda within the same region. If you signed the S3 file as a URL to let people download the file, you get billed by "internet OUT" bandwidth charge.
Data Transfer charges only apply to data going from an AWS Region to the Internet. There is no charge for uploading to AWS, nor for moving data between S3 and EC2 in the same region.
If your data transfer costs are high, it suggests that you are serving a lot of traffic to the Internet, either from EC2 or S3.
I read that Azure has geo-redundant storage where data will have three copies synchronously created in the region and three copies asynchronously created in another geographic region for disaster recovery. I searched the web resources for AWS EBS storage but could not find any information for async geo-redundancy for EBS. Do they use another term for it or does AWS simply not have geo-redundant block storage?
No public cloud provider that I'm aware of has geo-redundant block storage. (Google Cloud has zone-redundant persistent disks though.) You probably saw geo-redundant blob/object storage.
AWS has S3 cross-region replication, but not a geo-redundant S3 storage class.
Which one is better for storing pictures and videos uploaded by user ?
Amazon s3 or Filesystem EC2 ?
While opinion-based questions are discouraged on StackOverflow, and answers always depend upon the particular situation, it is highly likely that Amazon S3 is your better choice.
You didn't say whether only wish to store the data, or whether you also wish to serve the data out to users. I'll assume both.
Benefits of using Amazon S3 to store static assets such as pictures and videos:
S3 is pay-as-you-go (only pay for the storage consumed, with different options depending upon how often/fast you wish to retrieve the objects)
S3 is highly available: You don't need to run any servers
S3 is highly durable: Your data is duplicated across three data centres, so it is more resilient to failure
S3 is highly scalable: It can handle massive volumes of requests. If you served content from Amazon EC2, you'd have to scale-out to meet requests
S3 has in-built security at the object, bucket and user level.
Basically, Amazon S3 is a fully-managed storage service that can serve static assets out to the Internet.
If you were to store data on an Amazon EC2 instance, and serve the content from the EC2 instance:
You would need to pre-provision storage using Amazon EBS volumes (and you pay for the entire volume even if it isn't all used)
You would need to Snapshot the EBS volumes to improve durability (EBS Snapshots are stored in Amazon S3, replicated between data centres)
You would need to scale your EC2 instances (make them bigger, or add more) to handle the workload
You would need to replicate data between instances if you are running multiple EC2 instances to meet request volumes
You would need to install and configure the software on the EC2 instance(s) to manage security, content serving, monitoring, etc.
The only benefit of storing this static data directly on an Amazon EC2 instance rather than Amazon S3 is that it is immediately accessible to software running on the instance. This makes the code simpler and access faster.
There is also the option of using Amazon Elastic File System (EFS), which is NAS-like storage. You can mount an EFS volume simultaneously on multiple EC2 instances. Data is replicated between multiple Availability Zones. It is charged on a pay-as-you-go basis. However, it is only the storage layer - you'd still need to use Amazon EC2 instance(s) to serve the content to the Internet.