An Introduction to Storage Options

With the increasing variety of storage options such as physically attached block storage, network attached block and file storage, and the more contemporary object-based storage, it’s important for cloud engineers to be able to choose the right option for their given use case. In the following section, you will look at the three primary categories of storage services offered by AWS – block storage, file storage, and object storage – and the differences between them will be discussed.

Block Storage

Block storage stores data in fixed-sized chunks on a physical hard drive. The disk is divided into volumes accessible to your EC2 instances (servers) over network interfaces. This allows your servers’ operating system (OS) to access the volume directly, format it, and write and read data to and from it. The server OS oversees the storage partition to which it has been given access and manages how data is written to the volume...