Storage
Storage services are priced depending on the type of service being used. For most workloads, storage services can be broadly split into two main categories:
- Block storage: When it comes to block storage, AWS provides three main storage devices to choose from – SSD volumes, HDD volumes, and finally, magnetic volumes. SSD volumes are designed to run the most common workloads, including general-purpose workloads as well as workloads that require frequent reads and writes, and input/output operations per second (IOPs). HDD volumes can be used for generic workloads that require high throughput, and magnetic volumes are used primarily as backup or tape drives.
Amazon EBS volumes are priced based on three factors:
- The storage volume (in GB) provisioned for the EBS volume
- The snapshot storage (in GB): Each snapshot is stored in an Amazon S3 bucket and can be used to restore the state of an instance in case of a failure
- The data transferred out from the EBS volume: This can be data that is transferred out from the EC2 instance, or it can also include cross-regional data transfers
- Object storage: Similar to the block storage options, object storage is also charged based on the amount of storage that you consume. In this case, Amazon S3 charges customers based on the following factors:
- The amount of storage consumed, based on the objects stored within a bucket.
- The storage class used to store the objects: This can be in the form of S3 Standard, a general-purpose storage ideal for frequently accessed data, or even tiered storage options such as S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (IA), which is designed for less frequent data access patterns. S3 Standard-IA comes at a slightly cheaper rate compared to the Standard tier. Customers can also further reduce their object storage costs by automatically transitioning objects through various storage tiers, including a deep storage archive layer called S3 Glacier, using one or more S3 Lifecycle policies.
- The amount of data transferred to the outside world as well as across AWS Regions.
- The number of retrieval requests made for the data and objects: Different operations may have different costs associated with them. For example, a simple GET request to retrieve an object might have one price, while other types of data access, such as PUT, or management operations may have different prices. Some storage classes, such as S3 Glacier, also have retrieval charges.
Note
You can estimate your costs using AWS Pricing Calculator. However, remember that AWS Pricing Calculator does not take into account any taxes that might apply to your workloads.
While block storage plays an important part in general data management in your enterprise infrastructure, databases, both SQL and NoSQL, are another common, more specialized storage framework, which we will discuss in the next section.
