Beginner 15 min read

Comparing AWS Storage Services

By the end of this lesson, you'll be able to:

Summarize what S3, EBS, and EFS are each best suited for
Choose an appropriate storage service for a described application requirement
Explain why the choice should be driven by access pattern, not by which service name is most familiar

Prerequisites: "EBS vs. EFS: Choosing the Right File Storage"

The three models, side by side

This module has now covered all three AWS storage models this course focuses on. Bringing them together:

S3 — object storage. Good for documents, images, backups, logs, static website assets, and large datasets accessed as discrete objects rather than a live, mounted filesystem.

EBS — block storage. Good for an EC2 instance's own disks: the operating system volume, and application storage that behaves like a traditional attached disk, used by one instance at a time.

EFS — shared file storage. Good for shared Linux filesystem use cases specifically — multiple compute instances that genuinely need concurrent access to the same files and directories.

Side-by-side comparison of S3 as object storage accessed via API for files at any scale, EBS as block storage attached to one EC2 instance at a time within a single Availability Zone, and EFS as shared file storage mountable by many EC2 instances across multiple Availability Zones. — None of these three "wins" over the others — the right choice depends entirely on the access pattern the workload actually needs.

Choose by access pattern, not by familiarity

The single most important habit this module can leave you with: choose storage based on the application's actual access pattern and requirements, not simply because a service name is the one you've heard of most. A learner who defaults to "put everything in S3" or "just attach an EBS volume" without asking what the workload actually needs will eventually build something that technically works but fits poorly — expensive, awkward, or fragile in ways a five-minute access-pattern analysis would have avoided.

A quick gut-check that holds up well in practice: is this a discrete file you're storing and retrieving as a whole (S3)? Is this a disk one specific instance needs (EBS)? Do multiple things need to read and write the same files at once (EFS)? Most real decisions fall out cleanly once the question is framed that way.

Exercise

For each scenario, choose S3, EBS, or EFS, and briefly justify your choice: (1) storing daily database backup files, (2) the root operating-system volume for a single EC2 instance, (3) a shared upload directory that five application servers all need to read and write to simultaneously.

Show hint

Ask, for each one: is it a discrete stored file, a single instance's disk, or genuinely shared concurrent access?

Comparing AWS Storage Services Quiz

1. A team needs to store nightly database backup files, retrieved occasionally for restores. Which storage service best fits this use case?

Amazon S3, since backups are discrete objects stored and retrieved as whole files Amazon EBS, since every backup needs its own dedicated EC2 instance Amazon EFS, since backups always require concurrent access from multiple servers None of these — AWS has no service suited to backup storage

2. The best storage choice is always whichever AWS storage service the team is most familiar with, regardless of the workload's access pattern.

True False

My Notes

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Summary

S3 (object storage), EBS (block storage), and EFS (shared file storage) solve genuinely different problems, and choosing between them should come from the application's actual access pattern and requirements, not from defaulting to whichever service happens to be most familiar.

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