S3 vs EBS vs EFS

What are the differences between S3, EBS, EFS?

Photo by Anthony Riera on Unsplash

S3

• Provides teams with highly scalable object storage that is easy to use and can retrieve any amount of data from anywhere around the globe. Great place to store your objects i.e pictures, videos, or any kind of file storage you should use S3. You can’t install an operating system on S3 and you can’t install a database on S3, it’s used only for flat/static files — things that don’t change.

EBS

• Elastic block storage, aka storage volumes. Used with EC2 instances. Think of EBS as a virtual hard drive in the cloud. It’s perfect for installing operating systems or databases. It’s also possible to store files in EBS but you won’t get the same redundancy as S3.
• It’s also possible to attach multiple EC2 instances to one EBS.
• EBS is automatically replicated within one availability zone. To protect you against failure and loss of data.
• Only available in one-availability zone. If you had say a kubernetes cluster and it stored data in the EBS volume in eu-west-2a. Only the node (ec2 instance) in eu-west-2a could access the volume. A node (ec2 instance) in eu-west2b, wouldn’t be able to access that EBS volume.

EFS

• Elastic file system. File storage service for EC2 instances, very similar to EBS in that it’s a place to install a database. However, EFS isn’t a set size. So, if you installed a database on it. EFS would autonomically scale to account for the extra memory. Whereas EBS wouldn’t scale automatically. A great use case for EFS would be a content management system.
• Multiple EC2 instances can access the same EFS store.
• Available in multi-availability zones. In this case all nodes can access the EFS volume, i.e nodes (ec2 instances) in eu-west-2a, eu-west-2b and eu-west-2c could access the EFS without the issues that EBS has with only being able in one availability zone.

And there you have it. Thank you for reading.

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