Finding a way to store, manage and distribute your data is a big challenge. Running applications, delivering content to users, hosting high traffic website or backing up documents, database and emails all require a lot of storage. And this need of more storage space keeps growing everyday.
Before migrating to cloud, the one and only possible solution was building our own repository. Lets focus on some common problems which we had to face earlier :
- First step is to buy huge amount of dedicated hardware and software.
- Then to get it running, we have to hire staff and set complex processes to make sure that your storage is performing well and backed up in case something fails.
- Adding more capacity may cost more money and time to deploy servers, hard drives and backup machines.
- To guess how much capacity you need in future is also very difficult.
The better way to deal with such problems is to use Amazon S3. Amazon S3 provides developers and IT team a safe and secure object storage i.e. it enables us to store and retrieve any amount of data anytime on the web. These objects are stored within resources named ‘buckets’ that can store upto 5 TB of data and we can assign read, write and delete permissions to these buckets in order to provide secure access to users.
When it comes to storage, the last thing we worry about is loosing valuable data. Amazon S3 helps makes sure that doesn’t happen by automatically making copies of your objects on multiple devices.With Amazon S3 you only pay for the space you actually use.
There are three storage classes in Amazon S3 :
- S3 standard for general purpose storage of active data.
- S3 standard infrequent access for long lived but less active data.
- Amazon glacier, for a long term archive.
It also provides life cycle policies for managing your data throughout its life cycle.Once the policy is set, your data will automatically migrate to the most appropriate storage class without making any changes to your application.
With Amazon S3, we don’t need to predict how much storage is to be needed in future, we can store as much data as we want to and can scale the storage accordingly.
Securing your data is very important and so Amazon S3 also provides you the flexibility to manage who can access your data with Access control lists, bucket policies and query string authentication.S3 also helps you to securely upload and download data with SSL encrypted endpoints and provides many other options for encrypting data.
Hence, it ensures that our data is stored safely,available when needed and must scale as our needs grow.
It was just a basic scenario of how storage is implemented by amazon web services. There are many other storage services in AWS like Amazon CloudFront, Amazon EBS, Amazon Elastic File System, Amazon Glacier, AWS Import/Export Snowball and AWS Storage Gateway etc. To learn more, please refer to our next blog.
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