Storage and Content Delivery

Amazon Web Services suggests a wide variety of services to fulfill the storage requirements.

• Key services
• Key concepts
• Usage scenarios

Check out this video on ‘AWS S3 Tutorial for Beginners?’:

• Buckets and Objects
• CloudFront Distributions
• Instance Store Volumes
• Amazon EBS Volumes
• Vaults and Archives
• Gateway architecture
• Setting up EFS

Now, let’s learn about these concepts in detail.

Buckets and Objects

Amazon S3 is an Internet-scale records storage carrier that handles huge quantities of records and big numbers of concurrent accesses. You can keep your information in bins known as buckets. You can manipulate who has permissions for each of these buckets. A bucket can incorporate any number of gadgets of any kind, along with HTML pages, supply, code documents, photograph documents, and encrypted statistics. The call of every bucket should be globally particular.

It is possible to cluster the objects using folders. These folders are incorporated in the key name of an object.

For example:

mysite/html/default.html.
protocol://domain/bucket_name/object_key
protocol: http or https can be chosen as a protocol.
Domain: s3.amazonnaws.com
bucket_name: Name provided to the bucket
object_key: The complete name for the object.

CloudFront Distributions

Content Delivery Network (CDN) can be built by CloudFront, so the content of your website will be available around the edge locations or in the data center. The content that belongs to you can be stored in an origin server, like HTTP server/Amazon S3. The related URL is as below:

http://distribution_id.cloudfront.net/file.ext

On the other hand, you can correlate your personal domain name with your CloudFront allocation.

Instance Store Volumes

EC2 instance will get instant store volumes from Amazon EC2. Since the disks attached to the volumes are actually attached to the same host node as the instance, the access to those volumes will be very quick. The instance store volume can be used only from a particular instance, throughout its life time.

Amazon EBS Volumes

Network-attached Storage (NAS) can be offered by Amazon EBS. They work along with EC2 instances and subsequently attach, create, and accumulate an Amazon EBS volume to instances. The instance can resemble a hard drive on your computer. At once, one volume only can be attached to the instance, but it is possible to remove an Amazon EBS volume from one EC2 instance and attach it to another.

Vaults and Archives

A container for archives is known as vaults and an archive is an object that will be saved by vaults, for example, video, document, photo, etc. Each archive must have a unique ID and also an optional explanation. If you wish to generate and remove a vault using AWS Management Console, then you should upload, download, and remove archives programmatically.

Gateway  Architecture

Oftentimes, organizations want a reliable hybrid cloud storage service. Thus, they need a gateway that provides on-premises access to cloud storage. AWS Storage Gateway makes this process of hybridization between the on-premises storage and the AWS cloud easier. It also makes it easy to use the hybrid cloud structure. It makes sure that the application can easily access the data with low latency, high reliability, and security. The architecture of the Storage Gateway works simultaneously with both the on-premises storage and the AWS cloud. It is highly integrable with other AWS cloud services, such as AWS S3, AWS CBS, and AWS IAM.

You can easily set up Storage Gateway without affecting your application. Storage Gateway creates cache storage for recently used data in your on-premises data storage. You can easily migrate your backend data to the cloud within a few minutes. In the AWS cloud, Storage Gateway integrates with S3 for data processing and storage. It encrypts the data to be transmitted and migrates it through the Internet using a secure encrypted SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) or using AWS VPC.

Setting up EFS

AWS EFS is an easy-to-use service for your complex and unsupervised file structure. It deploys and manages your file system completely according to the application. It also provides you with an interface to configure and manage your file systems. You can set it up for your on-premises storage or the AWS cloud to easily share files across AWS services and between on-premises applications and cloud storage.

You can integrate EFS with EC2 instances or AWS Lambda so that these services can easily access the files in EFS. This makes your AWS infrastructure more efficient.

You can easily set it up as per the following steps:

• First, log in and create your AWS EFS console
• Second, set up your AWS EC2 resources, launch your EC2 instances, and mount the file system with the EC2 instances
• Then, you can migrate your files to AWS EFS with the help of AWS DataSync

For more details, you should explore the official AWS documentation.

To have a thorough understanding, please check out the below use cases.

Netflix is the world’s leading OTT platform with more than 100 million subscribers. It uses S3 for the storage of TBs of data. AWS S3 provides the platform with low latency and high scaling for a better user experience on the platform.

PUBG, an online multiplayer game, has more than 350 million registered users and around 500,000 concurrent users daily, playing on the gaming platform stream. To improve the scaling and performance of data, PUBG shifted its storage services to AWS S3 due to its increasing user base. PUBG shifted their whole storage on S3 in less than 15^th of the expected time and that too without affecting their business operations.