Amazon EBS vs Amazon S3

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Amazon EBS

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Amazon EBS vs Amazon S3: What are the differences?

Amazon EBS: Block level storage volumes for use with Amazon EC2 instances. Amazon EBS volumes are network-attached, and persist independently from the life of an instance. Amazon EBS provides highly available, highly reliable, predictable storage volumes that can be attached to a running Amazon EC2 instance and exposed as a device within the instance. Amazon EBS is particularly suited for applications that require a database, file system, or access to raw block level storage; Amazon S3: Store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. Amazon Simple Storage Service provides a fully redundant data storage infrastructure for storing and retrieving any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web.

Amazon EBS and Amazon S3 belong to "Cloud Storage" category of the tech stack.

Some of the features offered by Amazon EBS are:

  • Amazon EBS allows you to create storage volumes from 1 GB to 1 TB that can be mounted as devices by Amazon EC2 instances. Multiple volumes can be mounted to the same instance.
  • Amazon EBS enables you to provision a specific level of I/O performance if desired, by choosing a Provisioned IOPS volume. This allows you to predictably scale to thousands of IOPS per Amazon EC2 instance.
  • Storage volumes behave like raw, unformatted block devices, with user supplied device names and a block device interface. You can create a file system on top of Amazon EBS volumes, or use them in any other way you would use a block device (like a hard drive).

On the other hand, Amazon S3 provides the following key features:

  • Write, read, and delete objects containing from 1 byte to 5 terabytes of data each. The number of objects you can store is unlimited.
  • Each object is stored in a bucket and retrieved via a unique, developer-assigned key.
  • A bucket can be stored in one of several Regions. You can choose a Region to optimize for latency, minimize costs, or address regulatory requirements. Amazon S3 is currently available in the US Standard, US West (Oregon), US West (Northern California), EU (Ireland), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Sydney), South America (Sao Paulo), and GovCloud (US) Regions. The US Standard Region automatically routes requests to facilities in Northern Virginia or the Pacific Northwest using network maps.

"Point-in-time snapshots" is the top reason why over 34 developers like Amazon EBS, while over 589 developers mention "Reliable" as the leading cause for choosing Amazon S3.

Airbnb, Spotify, and Netflix are some of the popular companies that use Amazon S3, whereas Amazon EBS is used by Airbnb, Medium, and Instacart. Amazon S3 has a broader approval, being mentioned in 3230 company stacks & 1611 developers stacks; compared to Amazon EBS, which is listed in 179 company stacks and 47 developer stacks.

Advice on Amazon EBS and Amazon S3

Hello! I have a mobile app with nearly 100k MAU, and I want to add a cloud file storage service to my app.

My app will allow users to store their image, video, and audio files and retrieve them to their device when necessary.

I have already decided to use PHP & Laravel as my backend, and I use Contabo VPS. Now, I need an object storage service for my app, and my options are:

  • Amazon S3 : It sounds to me like the best option but the most expensive. Closest to my users (MENA Region) for other services, I will have to go to Europe. Not sure how important this is?

  • DigitalOcean Spaces : Seems like my best option for price/service, but I am still not sure

  • Wasabi: the best price (6 USD/MONTH/TB) and free bandwidth, but I am not sure if it fits my needs as I want to allow my users to preview audio and video files. They don't recommend their service for streaming videos.

  • Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage: Good price but not sure about them.

  • There is also the self-hosted s3 compatible option, but I am not sure about that.

Any thoughts will be helpful. Also, if you think I should post in a different sub, please tell me.

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Replies (2)
Michira Griffins
Software Developer at Codeshares Ltd · | 1 upvotes · 93.7K views

If pricing is the issue i'd suggest you use digital ocean, but if its not use amazon was digital oceans API is s3 compatible

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Decisions about Amazon EBS and Amazon S3

Minio is a free and open source object storage system. It can be self-hosted and is S3 compatible. During the early stage it would save cost and allow us to move to a different object storage when we scale up. It is also fast and easy to set up. This is very useful during development since it can be run on localhost.

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Gabriel Pa

We offer our customer HIPAA compliant storage. After analyzing the market, we decided to go with Google Storage. The Nodejs API is ok, still not ES6 and can be very confusing to use. For each new customer, we created a different bucket so they can have individual data and not have to worry about data loss. After 1000+ customers we started seeing many problems with the creation of new buckets, with saving or retrieving a new file. Many false positive: the Promise returned ok, but in reality, it failed.

That's why we switched to S3 that just works.

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