Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) is a high-performance, block-level storage service offered by AWS that is designed to work seamlessly with Amazon EC2 instances. As enterprises increasingly migrate workloads to the cloud, understanding how EBS functions and what it offers becomes critical. EBS enables the deployment of low-latency applications, persistent storage volumes, and consistent IOPS performance, making it an essential component of any robust cloud architecture.
Whether you’re running a relational database or hosting a file system, EBS provides the performance and flexibility required to manage data at scale. Unlike file or object storage, block storage like EBS stores data in fixed-size blocks, each with a unique address. This structure enables faster data access and fine-tuned control, which is essential for applications requiring precise data manipulation.
How Amazon EBS Works
Amazon EBS provides volumes that behave like raw, unformatted block devices. These volumes can be formatted with a file system or used in their raw form by applications. They are designed for exclusive attachment to one EC2 instance at a time, although that can be changed by stopping the instance, detaching the volume, and attaching it elsewhere.
Each EBS volume resides in a specific Availability Zone and is automatically replicated within that zone to prevent data loss from component failure. Users can choose from different volume types based on performance characteristics, cost, and intended use.
There are four primary types of Amazon EBS volumes:
- General Purpose SSD (gp3 and gp2) – Balanced performance and cost for a wide range of workloads.
- Provisioned IOPS SSD (io2 and io1) – High-performance SSD volumes designed for critical, latency-sensitive transactional workloads.
- Throughput Optimized HDD (st1) – Ideal for frequently accessed, large datasets and big data workloads.
- Cold HDD (sc1) – Low-cost HDD storage for infrequently accessed data.
Key Advantages of Amazon EBS
Amazon EBS is built for flexibility and performance, offering a range of benefits that cater to diverse use cases.
Consistent and Low-Latency Performance
With SSD-backed volumes, EBS delivers predictable and consistent IOPS performance. Provisioned IOPS volumes allow applications like transactional databases to operate with minimal latency. For workloads where performance consistency is non-negotiable, EBS provides tight latency control and dependable throughput.
High Availability and Durability
Amazon EBS automatically replicates data within its Availability Zone. This ensures durability even in the face of hardware failure. Although it doesn’t span across zones, you can create snapshots and replicate them to other regions, providing a flexible approach to disaster recovery and redundancy.
Easy Backup and Restoration
Point-in-time snapshots allow users to back up EBS volumes to Amazon S3, which is highly durable and secure. These snapshots can be restored to new volumes, making recovery simple in case of data corruption, accidental deletion, or region-specific issues.
Separation of Performance from Storage Capacity
With GP3 volumes, you can independently provision IOPS and throughput, irrespective of storage size. This is especially beneficial when workloads require high performance but don’t need large amounts of storage.
Geographic Redundancy and Replication
EBS snapshots can be copied across AWS Regions. This allows enterprises to duplicate environments across geographies for high availability, compliance, and quicker recovery from regional outages.
Rapid Scaling and Flexibility
Volumes can be resized or changed on the fly, allowing you to adapt quickly to changing workload requirements. Elastic Volumes let you increase capacity, tune performance, or change volume type without downtime.
Security Features
EBS integrates with AWS Key Management Service (KMS) to provide volume-level encryption using customer-managed keys. This encrypts data at rest, in transit between the instance and the volume, and during snapshot operations. You can also define fine-grained access controls using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to restrict who can manage or access EBS volumes and snapshots.
Cost Considerations
Pricing for EBS is determined by the volume type, provisioned size, provisioned IOPS, and data transferred out. General Purpose SSDs (gp3) offer the best balance of cost and performance for most applications. If your storage needs are consistent and accessed by only one instance, EBS is often more cost-effective than EFS or S3, especially when you can accurately estimate the required volume size.
You pay for the entire provisioned volume, not just the data used. However, the cost per GB is lower than file storage options when used efficiently.
Amazon EBS Use Cases
Relational Databases
Amazon EBS is an ideal choice for running relational databases such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server. It offers the performance, durability, and reliability needed for transaction-heavy workloads. With Provisioned IOPS volumes, EBS ensures that critical database operations complete without delay.
NoSQL Databases
NoSQL systems like Cassandra and MongoDB rely on fast disk I/O and low latency. EBS offers the necessary throughput and consistent performance to support these workloads, whether you’re deploying a high-throughput analytics pipeline or a large-scale document database.
Enterprise Applications
Applications like Microsoft Exchange, SAP, and custom ERP systems benefit from the robust performance and durability of EBS. EBS volumes can be tuned to support the unique requirements of these applications, whether it involves high IOPS, throughput, or frequent backup cycles.
Dev/Test and CI/CD Pipelines
EBS is useful for rapidly provisioning environments needed for testing, staging, or development. Snapshots allow you to create identical copies of your development environments, and you can easily scale storage as your application evolves.
Backup and Disaster Recovery
Snapshots stored in Amazon S3 serve as efficient backups and can be used to restore instances in different regions, enabling robust disaster recovery strategies. They can also be used to clone environments for compliance testing or incident response simulations.
Geographic Expansion
Organizations can duplicate EBS snapshots across regions to create consistent environments in new geographies. This approach supports global expansion, low-latency deployments, and compliance with data residency laws.
Limitations and Considerations
EBS volumes are bound to a single Availability Zone and instance. While snapshots help with replication, they aren’t a replacement for multi-zone redundancy. Additionally, pre-provisioned storage may lead to underutilization if not planned carefully. For shared storage needs or serverless workloads, EBS might not be the best fit compared to Amazon EFS or S3.
Amazon EBS is a foundational component of AWS infrastructure, offering powerful and scalable block storage for compute-intensive and transaction-heavy workloads. It excels in scenarios requiring fast, persistent storage attached to a single compute instance. With a variety of volume types, performance tuning options, and built-in snapshot support, Amazon EBS can serve as a reliable storage solution for a wide array of cloud-based applications.
By understanding its architecture, advantages, and use cases, you can make informed decisions about when to use Amazon EBS versus other AWS storage services. In Part 2 of this series, we’ll explore Amazon EFS and how it supports scalable, shared file storage in dynamic cloud environments.
Exploring Amazon EFS – Scalable File Storage for Shared Access Workloads
Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) is a fully-managed, scalable file storage service built to handle multiple workloads and shared access scenarios. As cloud-native and legacy applications increasingly rely on flexible storage systems, EFS addresses the need for dynamic storage that automatically grows and shrinks as files are added or removed, without requiring management of provisioning or performance tuning.
Unlike Amazon EBS, which is a block-level storage service tied to a single instance, EFS supports simultaneous access from multiple EC2 instances. It’s an ideal choice for use cases such as web content serving, big data analytics, container storage, and lift-and-shift migrations.
Amazon EFS integrates seamlessly with Linux-based workloads using the NFSv4 and NFSv4.1 protocols, and supports use with Amazon EC2, AWS Lambda, AWS Fargate, and on-premises servers.
How Amazon EFS Works
Amazon EFS is a shared, elastic file system that can be mounted concurrently across thousands of instances. Once the file system is created, it can be accessed from one or more EC2 instances within the same VPC, or across peered VPCs using VPC peering. EFS stores data redundantly across multiple Availability Zones for high availability and durability.
The architecture supports two performance modes:
- General Purpose – Best suited for latency-sensitive use cases such as content management systems and home directories.
- Max I/O – Designed for high-throughput workloads with massive scale and parallelism, such as analytics and media processing.
Users can also choose between two throughput modes:
- Bursting Throughput – Automatically adjusts based on the size of the file system.
- Provisioned Throughput – Set explicitly, regardless of storage size, for workloads that need guaranteed performance.
Key Advantages of Amazon EFS
Shared File Storage
One of EFS’s core advantages is its ability to allow multiple EC2 instances to access the same data simultaneously. This is essential for clustered applications, content repositories, or any system where concurrent access to a central dataset is required.
Automatic Scaling
EFS dynamically scales based on the volume of data stored, which eliminates the need to provision storage in advance. It can scale from a few gigabytes to petabytes without manual intervention, supporting workloads with unpredictable or rapidly changing storage needs.
Integrated Lifecycle Management
With Lifecycle Management, EFS can automatically move files not accessed for 30 days into the Infrequent Access storage class. This helps reduce costs significantly without affecting performance when files are needed again.
Strong Performance
EFS is capable of handling hundreds of thousands of IOPS and up to 10 GB/s of throughput, depending on your use case. It can handle workloads that demand high throughput, low latency, and massive parallelism.
Serverless Integration
Unlike EBS, EFS can integrate directly with AWS Lambda. This allows serverless functions to access large data sets stored in EFS file systems, eliminating the need for bundling large data into your functions or depending on S3 for read/write operations.
No Management Overhead
Amazon EFS is a fully managed service. AWS handles all system updates, patching, and performance tuning. You don’t need to worry about scaling infrastructure, replacing failed drives, or configuring RAID levels.
Multi-AZ Redundancy
Data is automatically stored across multiple Availability Zones, providing resilience against zone-specific failures. This ensures that file systems are highly available and durable by default.
Security Features
EFS supports encryption of data at rest and in transit. You can control access to your EFS file systems using AWS IAM, security groups, VPC settings, and POSIX permissions. EFS integrates with AWS KMS for encryption key management and supports audit trails using AWS CloudTrail.
EFS can also be accessed securely from on-premises environments using AWS Direct Connect or AWS VPN, enabling hybrid workloads with strict compliance or data locality requirements.
Cost Considerations
Amazon EFS pricing is based on storage consumption and throughput. You only pay for the amount of storage used, with no need to pre-provision storage. This pay-as-you-go model works well for variable workloads.
There are two storage classes:
- EFS Standard – Active files with high access frequency.
- EFS Infrequent Access – For files that are rarely used, but must be readily available.
Using Lifecycle Management, you can automatically reduce storage costs by moving unused files to the infrequent access class, saving up to 85% over the standard class.
While EFS offers convenience and shared access, its per-GB cost is typically higher than EBS or S3. This makes it best suited for workloads that need shared access or experience fluctuating storage needs.
Amazon EFS Use Cases
Lift-and-Shift Application Migrations
EFS supports traditional enterprise applications without re-architecting them for cloud environments. Applications that depend on shared file storage can be moved to AWS and continue to function as they did on-premises.
Big Data Analytics
For workloads requiring massive parallel access and high throughput, such as genomics, log processing, and scientific computing, EFS provides the performance and scale needed. It supports multiple concurrent connections and delivers strong throughput under heavy demand.
Web Serving and Content Management
Web servers, CMS platforms, and content delivery pipelines often require simultaneous access to media files, templates, and user-generated content. EFS offers centralized storage for these assets with fast, reliable access.
Shared Development Environments
In collaborative environments where developers need access to the same files, EFS supports mounting the file system across multiple EC2 instances. This allows seamless code sharing and centralized resource management for build servers, version control systems, or automation pipelines.
Container Storage
EFS integrates with Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS, enabling persistent storage for containerized workloads. It allows multiple containers in different pods or services to read and write to the same file system simultaneously.
Data Science and Machine Learning
Data scientists working with massive datasets often need high-throughput, shared storage. EFS enables ML models to read and write data during training and inference stages without needing to move files between storage systems.
Limitations and Considerations
While EFS is powerful, it has some limitations:
- EFS is optimized for Linux-based systems and supports NFS protocols only. It doesn’t support Windows-based file systems.
- Because it’s a shared file system, write operations from multiple clients can introduce contention or consistency issues if not properly managed.
- The higher per-GB cost means that for workloads requiring only single-instance access or long-term storage, EBS or S3 may be more cost-efficient.
Amazon EFS bridges the gap between performance and scalability in file-based storage. It’s best suited for shared access environments and variable workloads that demand elasticity and reliability. Its serverless integration, built-in redundancy, and automatic scaling make it a compelling choice for modern application architectures, especially those based on microservices, containerization, or hybrid deployments.
While it’s more expensive than block or object storage on a per-GB basis, the operational efficiency and flexibility it brings often justify the investment in scenarios where shared file systems are essential.
In this series, we’ll dive into Amazon S3 – AWS’s most versatile storage service – and examine how object storage powers scalability, availability, and advanced data workflows.
Deep Dive into Amazon S3 – Scalable Object Storage for Any Use Case
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is a highly scalable, durable, and secure object storage service built to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere. Whether you’re archiving application logs, building a media delivery platform, running big data analytics, or hosting static websites, S3 is the go-to solution across industries and use cases.
Unlike Amazon EBS and EFS, which are block and file storage systems, Amazon S3 uses an object storage architecture. This allows data to be stored as discrete units, or “objects,” identified by a unique key, with optional metadata and stored in containers called “buckets.” The object-based nature of S3 makes it highly suitable for unstructured data storage, massive-scale data lakes, and internet-facing workloads.
How Amazon S3 Works
Amazon S3 stores data as objects within buckets. Each object includes the data itself, metadata, and a unique identifier. Buckets are globally unique across AWS and can be configured for region-specific storage to optimize latency and compliance.
When you upload an object to S3, you can define access controls, set lifecycle rules, and apply encryption. S3 provides virtually unlimited scalability, automatically handling growing data without requiring users to manage infrastructure.
Objects are accessed using HTTPS requests via the AWS Management Console, SDKs, REST API, or CLI. Amazon S3 also integrates natively with many AWS services, making it a core part of the AWS ecosystem.
Key Advantages of Amazon S3
Extreme Durability and Availability
S3 offers 99.999999999% (11 nines) durability, ensuring that once data is stored, it is preserved with near certainty. Data is automatically replicated across multiple devices and facilities within a region, and versioning can protect against accidental deletion or overwrites.
Standard storage offers 99.99% availability, which is suitable for most production workloads. For mission-critical applications, availability can be increased with cross-region replication.
Scalability and Performance
S3 is designed to scale automatically as data grows. Whether you’re storing a few gigabytes or petabytes of data, S3 handles scale without performance degradation. It supports thousands of requests per second and integrates with AWS services like Amazon Athena, Amazon Redshift Spectrum, and AWS Lambda for serverless analytics and data transformation.
Storage Classes for Cost Optimization
S3 offers multiple storage classes to optimize cost based on access frequency:
- S3 Standard – High availability and low latency for frequently accessed data.
- S3 Intelligent-Tiering – Automatically moves data between frequent and infrequent tiers based on usage patterns.
- S3 Standard-IA (Infrequent Access) – For data accessed less often but still needing rapid access.
- S3 One Zone-IA – Lower-cost option for infrequently accessed data stored in a single Availability Zone.
- S3 Glacier – Low-cost archive storage for data that is rarely accessed but needs retrieval within minutes or hours.
- S3 Glacier Deep Archive – The lowest-cost storage class, designed for long-term archiving and digital preservation.
Robust Security and Compliance
S3 offers comprehensive security controls, including bucket policies, IAM integration, encryption at rest and in transit, and access logging. Data can be encrypted using AWS KMS or customer-managed keys.
Features like S3 Object Lock help protect data from being deleted or overwritten, making S3 compliant with WORM (Write Once, Read Many) regulatory requirements. Amazon Macie can be used to automatically identify sensitive data stored in S3, such as personally identifiable information (PII).
Lifecycle Management and Automation
With S3 Lifecycle policies, you can automate the transition of objects between storage classes or set expiration rules. This helps optimize storage costs and reduce manual overhead for archiving and data retention.
S3 supports event notifications that trigger workflows through AWS Lambda, SNS, or SQS when certain operations occur, such as object creation or deletion. This makes S3 highly adaptable in automated pipelines and serverless applications.
Amazon S3 Use Cases
Data Lakes and Analytics
S3 is the backbone of modern data lakes. You can ingest raw data from multiple sources into S3 and analyze it using services like Amazon Athena or Amazon EMR without needing to move it elsewhere. With S3 Select and Glacier Select, you can retrieve specific data from within an object, reducing the amount of data transferred and speeding up analytics.
Backup and Restore
S3 is a reliable solution for cloud backups due to its durability and easy integration with AWS Backup, EBS, and other services. Organizations can store snapshots, system images, and critical files in S3 and restore them quickly during outages.
By combining S3 with services like AWS Snowball or AWS Storage Gateway, hybrid backup solutions can also be created to span on-premises and cloud environments.
Application Hosting and Media Delivery
Amazon S3 can serve static websites directly from a bucket. You can host HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and image files with near-infinite scale. For global delivery, integrating S3 with Amazon CloudFront enables content distribution with low latency and high transfer speeds.
For video streaming platforms and image repositories, S3 provides secure, scalable object storage that can serve millions of users.
Archiving and Compliance
With long-term storage classes like Glacier and Glacier Deep Archive, S3 is widely used for regulatory compliance, archiving legal documents, medical records, and historical datasets. Features like Object Lock and bucket logging help meet audit and compliance requirements.
Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity
S3’s cross-region replication allows for seamless replication of critical data to another AWS region, supporting fast disaster recovery and continuity plans. In the event of an outage, data can be restored from a separate geographical location without manual intervention.
Serverless Application Storage
In serverless architectures, S3 acts as a persistent storage layer. AWS Lambda functions can trigger in response to events in S3, enabling real-time data processing pipelines. For example, image upload to S3 can automatically trigger a Lambda function to process and tag it.
Cost Optimization Strategies
To manage costs effectively, users should:
- Use Intelligent-Tiering for data with unpredictable access patterns.
- Implement Lifecycle Policies to transition older data to lower-cost storage classes.
- Set object expiration policies for temporary data.
- Regularly use S3 Storage Class Analysis to review and adapt storage strategies.
While S3 is cost-efficient, certain workloads with constant write/read operations and single-instance access patterns may be better served with EBS or EFS from a performance or latency standpoint.
Integration and Ecosystem
Amazon S3 is deeply integrated with the AWS ecosystem. You can use it as a source or destination for:
- Amazon SageMaker: Machine learning models accessing training data
- Amazon Redshift Spectrum: Querying S3 data directly using SQL
- AWS Glue: Cataloging and transforming raw S3 data for analytics
- AWS CloudTrail: Logging API access to meet compliance needs
This tight integration makes S3 a powerful core service that supports storage, compute, analytics, and security within a unified cloud environment.
Limitations and Considerations
Despite its versatility, S3 has a few limitations:
- S3 is eventually consistent for overwrite and delete operations in some regions, though strong read-after-write consistency is now the default in most regions.
- It is not suitable for transactional workloads that require file locking or millisecond-level latency. EBS or EFS are better suited in those cases.
- Access to objects is through APIs or HTTPS, which may add overhead compared to direct block or file system access.
Amazon S3 is one of the most foundational and flexible storage solutions in AWS. It enables developers, analysts, and IT teams to store vast amounts of unstructured data while optimizing cost, security, and performance. Its wide range of storage classes, tight integration with AWS services, and robust automation make it the default storage layer for countless applications.
For workloads centered around archival, media hosting, backup, or massive-scale data lakes, S3 is not just a storage solution—it’s a strategic platform.
We’ll bring it all together and compare Amazon EBS, EFS, and S3 to help you determine the right solution for each scenario.
Amazon EBS vs Amazon EFS vs Amazon S3 – Choosing the Right Storage Solution
As you architect applications on Amazon Web Services, selecting the right storage service is essential to achieving performance, scalability, and cost-efficiency. Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), Amazon Elastic File System (EFS), and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) are three foundational storage options, each designed for specific workloads and access patterns.
In this series, we’ll bring together what we’ve learned and offer practical guidance on when to use each service. Understanding the core differences will help you make informed architectural decisions for your applications, whether you’re working on a small web project or a multi-region enterprise system.
Storage Type and Architecture
Each AWS storage service is designed with a specific storage model:
- Amazon EBS offers block storage, where data is stored in fixed-sized blocks and presented to the operating system as disk volumes. It’s ideal for boot volumes, transactional applications, and structured storage needs.
- Amazon EFS provides file storage, delivering a POSIX-compliant, shared file system accessible from multiple EC2 instances. It suits workloads requiring concurrent access to files and scalable throughput.
- Amazon S3 uses object storage, storing data as objects in buckets, identified by unique keys. It is optimized for storing large volumes of unstructured data, backups, and static assets.
Performance and Latency
Choosing between these services often depends on the latency and throughput your application demands:
- EBS is optimized for low-latency, high-performance workloads. SSD-backed volumes (gp3 or io2) support high IOPS and are suitable for databases, log processing, and intensive read/write operations.
- EFS offers scalable throughput, particularly in burstable patterns, and supports concurrent access by thousands of clients. It has higher latency than EBS but is sufficient for content management systems, home directories, and analytics jobs.
- S3 provides high throughput but is not designed for low-latency file access. It uses HTTP(S) APIs to retrieve data and is suitable for write-once, read-many workloads such as archival storage, media content delivery, and data lakes.
Scalability
When considering scalability:
- EBS scales vertically by increasing volume size or provisioning higher IOPS. However, each volume is attached to a single EC2 instance, limiting scalability for multi-instance access unless you replicate data manually.
- EFS automatically scales based on data stored, handling sudden spikes and millions of files without provisioning. It supports simultaneous access from many compute nodes.
- S3 is virtually unlimited in scale. It can store trillions of objects and handle thousands of requests per second. There’s no manual scaling required.
Accessibility and Integration
Your application’s access requirements may determine the right storage option:
- EBS is tightly bound to EC2. Volumes must be mounted on the same Availability Zone as the EC2 instance. You can’t access EBS directly from other AWS services or serverless architectures.
- EFS supports access across EC2 instances and VPCs, and can be used with containerized applications via Amazon ECS and EKS. It also integrates with AWS Lambda for serverless file access.
- S3 is accessible globally via HTTPS and integrates with almost every AWS service, including Lambda, Athena, SageMaker, CloudFront, and more. It’s the only one of the three that can easily be accessed publicly (if configured) or from the browser.
Data Management and Durability
All three services provide high durability, but with different mechanisms:
- EBS volumes are replicated within the same Availability Zone for redundancy. Snapshots allow you to back up volumes to S3 for durability and portability.
- EFS stores data across multiple Availability Zones in a region, providing regional durability. It also supports lifecycle policies to move infrequently accessed files to EFS Infrequent Access.
- S3 delivers 11 nines of durability across multiple facilities in a region. It supports versioning, cross-region replication, lifecycle policies, and Object Lock for immutability and regulatory compliance.
Security Features
Security in AWS storage services is robust across the board:
- EBS supports encryption at rest using AWS KMS and fine-grained access control via IAM. Snapshots can also be encrypted.
- EFS uses IAM, VPC security groups, NFS-based permissions (POSIX), and KMS for encryption at rest and in transit.
- S3 provides advanced access control with IAM, bucket policies, Access Control Lists (ACLs), and pre-signed URLs. It also supports encryption via KMS, client-side, or SSE-S3, and integrates with Amazon Macie for sensitive data detection.
Pricing Considerations
Each service has a different pricing structure and cost behavior:
- EBS pricing is based on provisioned capacity and type (SSD vs HDD). You pay for the volume size, not what you use. Snapshots are billed separately.
- EFS charges are based on storage used and throughput. It’s more expensive per GB than EBS or S3, but you only pay for what you consume. The EFS Infrequent Access tier significantly reduces costs for older files.
- S3 offers the most cost-efficient model for storing massive amounts of data. With tiered storage options like S3 Standard, Infrequent Access, Glacier, and Glacier Deep Archive, you can reduce costs depending on how often your data is accessed.
Choosing the Right Storage for Your Workload
Here are common scenarios and the best storage choice for each:
- Transactional databases: Use Amazon EBS with Provisioned IOPS SSD for high performance and low latency.
- Shared access to application files: Use Amazon EFS for distributed environments where multiple EC2 instances need file-level access.
- Data archival and backup: Use Amazon S3 Glacier or Deep Archive to reduce costs for infrequently accessed data.
- Web hosting and static content delivery: Use Amazon S3 with CloudFront for scalability and low-latency delivery.
- Serverless workloads: Use Amazon S3 for storing function input/output or EFS for sharing large datasets with AWS Lambda.
- Media processing: Use Amazon S3 for storing original media files and outputs, with event-driven workflows using AWS Lambda.
- Content management systems: Use Amazon EFS for shared file access in web and content applications.
- Log storage and analysis: Store logs in Amazon S3, and analyze them using Amazon Athena or Amazon Redshift Spectrum.
Migration and Hybrid Scenarios
If you’re migrating on-premises applications to AWS:
- Use AWS Storage Gateway to bridge on-premises apps with S3 or EFS.
- For lift-and-shift of block storage-based workloads, EBS is the easiest drop-in replacement.
- Use DataSync or Snowball for large-scale data migration to EFS or S3.
Hybrid architectures often use S3 as a central data lake, EBS for compute-bound workloads, and EFS for applications with shared state.
Final Recommendations
- Choose Amazon EBS when you need low-latency, high-performance block storage for a single instance.
- Choose Amazon EFS when your application requires shared access, high concurrency, and file system semantics.
- Choose Amazon S3 for storing large volumes of unstructured data, static files, and backups, especially for globally distributed and serverless applications.
By aligning your storage choices with workload requirements and access patterns, you can maximize performance, reduce costs, and simplify architecture.
Final Thoughts
EBS, EFS, and S3 represent the foundational AWS storage services, each purpose-built to serve specific needs. Understanding how each works and where it excels allows you to design scalable, performant, and cost-effective cloud architectures.
As you build applications or migrate legacy systems to AWS, revisit these principles to guide your storage architecture decisions. The right choice isn’t just about features—it’s about matching the storage strategy to your data access patterns, security requirements, and long-term business goals.
Let AWS storage services power your next innovation—intelligently, securely, and at scale.