The table below shows the major differences (not all) between available AWS storage systems.
Note I am not including Glacier here as Glacier is purely meant for archiving and it doesn't make sense to compare with other storage systems -at least as of this day :)
Note I am not including Glacier here as Glacier is purely meant for archiving and it doesn't make sense to compare with other storage systems -at least as of this day :)
| Feature/Product | S3 (Simple Storage Service) | EBS (Elastic Block Storage) | EFS (Elastic File Storage) |
| Accessibility | Publicly accessible with key-id | Only thru the associated EC2 instance | Can be accessed thru more than one EC2 and AWS services |
| Access Control | IAM Bucket policies and User policies |
IAM Security Groups |
IAM Security Groups |
| Interface | Web Interface | File System Interface | Web and File System Interface |
| Storage Type | Object Storage | Block Storage | Object Storage |
| Cost $$ | Cheaper than EBS and EFS | > S3 and < EFS | More expensive than EBS |
| Scalable | Scalable | Manual | Scalable |
| Performance | Slower than EBS and EFS | Faster than S3 and EFS | Faster than S3 and slower than EBS |
| Best used for | Storing backups | meant to be EC2 drive | Sharable apps and workloads. |
