AWS Storage Services

Storage is one of the most heavily weighted service areas on the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam, and almost every other service writes data to it in some form. This topic walks through the three main storage types on AWS, object, block, and file, and the services that deliver each one.

The thread that ties the lessons together is matching the storage type to the job. Object storage with Amazon S3 holds files and backups at scale, block storage with Amazon EBS acts as a disk for a single server, and file storage with Amazon EFS and Amazon FSx lets many servers share the same files. The topic closes with hybrid storage and centralized backups for teams that still run their own data centers.

What This Topic Covers

• object storage with Amazon S3, including buckets, objects, keys, durability, and security
• the S3 storage classes, from S3 Standard to the Glacier archive tiers, and how lifecycle rules cut cost
• block storage with Amazon EBS, its SSD and HDD volume types, and how snapshots back up to Amazon S3
• shared file storage with Amazon EFS for Linux and Amazon FSx for Windows and high-performance workloads
• hybrid cloud storage with AWS Storage Gateway, connecting on-premises systems to AWS
• centralized, automated backups across many services with AWS Backup

Why It Matters

Storage questions are common on the exam, and most of them describe a scenario and ask which service fits. If you can tell object, block, and file storage apart, and match each to Amazon S3, Amazon EBS, and Amazon EFS or Amazon FSx, you can answer a large share of them with confidence.

These services also support the rest of the course. EBS volumes back the EC2 instances from the compute topic, S3 stores the snapshots and logs that other services produce, and the storage classes feed straight into the pricing domain. Once you know what each storage service is for, the database, networking, and cost lessons have a foundation to build on.