Overview

Amazon S3

Stacks55.1K

Followers40.2K

Votes2.0K

Amazon EBS

Stacks650

Followers542

Votes82

Amazon EBS vs Amazon S3: What are the differences?

Key Differences between Amazon EBS and Amazon S3

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) are two popular storage services provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS). While they both offer storage solutions, there are several key differences between them.

Data Structure: Amazon EBS provides block-level storage, which means it is suitable for applications that require direct access to the underlying block storage device. On the other hand, Amazon S3 is an object storage service that manages data as individual objects within buckets, providing a highly scalable and durable storage solution.
Access Method: With Amazon EBS, you can attach the storage volumes to EC2 instances and use them as block devices, allowing data to be accessed at the block level. In contrast, Amazon S3 provides RESTful APIs for accessing objects over the internet, enabling you to store and retrieve data from anywhere.
Performance: Amazon EBS is designed for low-latency performance and provides consistent I/O performance for applications that require high-speed data access. In comparison, Amazon S3 is optimized for scalable storage and offers high durability and availability at the expense of lower performance for individual object retrievals.
Cost Structure: The cost structure of Amazon EBS is based on the size and provisioned capacity of the storage volumes, which allows you to have more control over the cost. On the other hand, Amazon S3 follows a pay-as-you-go model, where you are charged based on the storage used, number of requests made, and data transfer.
Data Durability and Availability: Amazon EBS provides high durability and availability by automatically replicating data within a single availability zone. However, it does not provide data durability across multiple availability zones. On the contrary, Amazon S3 automatically stores multiple copies of your data across multiple availability zones, ensuring high durability and availability.
Suitability: Amazon EBS is best suited for applications that require low-latency access to data or applications that require block-level storage, such as databases or file systems. On the other hand, Amazon S3 is ideal for storing and retrieving large amounts of data, backup and restore scenarios, content distribution, and data archiving.

In summary, Amazon EBS offers block-level storage for direct access to storage devices, while Amazon S3 provides object storage with RESTful APIs. EBS is optimized for low latency and high-speed data access, while S3 is focused on scalable storage and high durability. The cost structure, data availability, and suitability also differ between the two services.

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Advice on Amazon S3, Amazon EBS

Mohammad

Aug 30, 2020

Needs adviceon

Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage

PHP

Laravel

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.

180k views180k

Comments

Dalton

Oct 23, 2020

Decided

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.

143k views143k

Comments

Gabriel

CEO at NaoLogic Inc

Dec 24, 2019

Decided

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.

330k views330k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Amazon S3	Amazon EBS
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 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.
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.;Objects stored in a Region never leave the Region unless you transfer them out. For example, objects stored in the EU (Ireland) Region never leave the EU.;Authentication mechanisms are provided to ensure that data is kept secure from unauthorized access. Objects can be made private or public, and rights can be granted to specific users.;Options for secure data upload/download and encryption of data at rest are provided for additional data protection.;Uses standards-based REST and SOAP interfaces designed to work with any Internet-development toolkit.;Built to be flexible so that protocol or functional layers can easily be added. The default download protocol is HTTP. A BitTorrent protocol interface is provided to lower costs for high-scale distribution.;Provides functionality to simplify manageability of data through its lifetime. Includes options for segregating data by buckets, monitoring and controlling spend, and automatically archiving data to even lower cost storage options. These options can be easily administered from the Amazon S3 Management Console.;Reliability backed with the Amazon S3 Service Level Agreement.	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).;Amazon EBS volumes are placed in a specific Availability Zone, and can then be attached to instances also in that same Availability Zone.;Each storage volume is automatically replicated within the same Availability Zone. This prevents data loss due to failure of any single hardware component.;Amazon EBS also provides the ability to create point-in-time snapshots of volumes, which are persisted to Amazon S3. These snapshots can be used as the starting point for new Amazon EBS volumes, and protect data for long-term durability. The same snapshot can be used to instantiate as many volumes as you wish. These snapshots can be copied across AWS regions, making it easier to leverage multiple AWS regions for geographical expansion, data center migration and disaster recovery.;AWS also enables you to create new volumes from AWS hosted public data sets.;Amazon CloudWatch exposes performance metrics for EBS volumes, giving you insight into bandwidth, throughput, latency, and queue depth. The metrics are accessible via the AWS CloudWatch API or the AWS Management Console. For more details, see Amazon CloudWatch.
Statistics
Stacks 55.1K	Stacks 650
Followers 40.2K	Followers 542
Votes 2.0K	Votes 82
Pros & Cons
Pros 590 Reliable 492 Scalable 456 Cheap 329 Simple & easy 83 Many sdks Cons 7 Permissions take some time to get right 6 Takes time/work to organize buckets & folders properly 6 Requires a credit card 3 Complex to set up	Pros 36 Point-in-time snapshots 27 Data reliability 19 Configurable i/o performance

What are some alternatives to Amazon S3, Amazon EBS?

Google Cloud Storage

Google Cloud Storage allows world-wide storing and retrieval of any amount of data and at any time. It provides a simple programming interface which enables developers to take advantage of Google's own reliable and fast networking infrastructure to perform data operations in a secure and cost effective manner. If expansion needs arise, developers can benefit from the scalability provided by Google's infrastructure.

Azure Storage

Azure Storage provides the flexibility to store and retrieve large amounts of unstructured data, such as documents and media files with Azure Blobs; structured nosql based data with Azure Tables; reliable messages with Azure Queues, and use SMB based Azure Files for migrating on-premises applications to the cloud.

Minio

Minio is an object storage server compatible with Amazon S3 and licensed under Apache 2.0 License

OpenEBS

OpenEBS allows you to treat your persistent workload containers, such as DBs on containers, just like other containers. OpenEBS itself is deployed as just another container on your host.

Rackspace Cloud Files

Cloud Files, powered by OpenStack®, provides an easy to use online storage for files and media which can be delivered globally at blazing speeds over Akamai's content delivery network (CDN).

Storj

It is an open source, decentralized file storage solution. It uses encryption, file sharing, and a blockchain-based hash table to store files on a peer-to-peer network. The goal is to make cloud file storage faster, cheaper, and private.

RunAbove

We give you full access to the OpenStack API, which our compute (Nova) and storage (Swift) solutions are based on. This means no provider lock-in and easy automation of all your deployments. You can also manage your account and billing details via our RESTful API. You can choose between Horizon or OVH's easy-to-use web panel.

DigitalOcean Spaces

DigitalOcean Spaces are designed to make it easy and cost effective to store and serve massive amounts of data. Spaces are ideal for storing static, unstructured data like audio, video, and images as well as large amounts of text.

Rook

It is an open source cloud-native storage orchestrator for Kubernetes, providing the platform, framework, and support for a diverse set of storage solutions to natively integrate with cloud-native environments.