Cloud Foundations - Section 2

What is Amazon S3?

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) is an object storage service for storing and retrieving any amount of data at any time, highly durable and scalable, used for backups, static website hosting, data lakes, archives, and more.

What is an S3 bucket?

A named container for storing objects (files) in S3

What is S3 durability?

S3 is designed for 99.999999999% (11 nines) durability — meaning objects are redundantly stored across multiple devices and facilities to protect against data loss.

What is S3 availability?

S3 availability depends on storage class (e.g., Standard typically 99.99%)

What are S3 storage classes?

Multiple tiers optimized for access patterns and cost: Standard, Intelligent-Tiering, Standard-IA (Infrequent Access), One Zone-IA, Glacier Instant/Flexible/Deep Archive, each with different cost and retrieval characteristics.

What is S3 Standard used for?

General-purpose storage for frequently accessed data with high durability and availability, low latency, and suitable for a wide range of use cases.

What is S3 Standard-IA used for?

Storage for data that is accessed less frequently but requires rapid retrieval when needed

What is S3 One Zone-IA?

A lower-cost option for infrequently accessed data stored in a single Availability Zone — cheaper but without multi-AZ redundancy, suitable for easily reproducible data.

What is S3 Glacier used for?

A low-cost archival storage class for long-term retention where retrieval times can take minutes to hours depending on retrieval option

What is S3 Glacier Deep Archive?

The lowest-cost S3 storage tier for very long-term retention (years), with retrieval times typically 12–48 hours — ideal for rarely accessed archival data.

What is S3 versioning?

A feature that preserves, retrieves, and restores every version of an object in a bucket so you can recover from unintended overwrites and deletions by keeping historical versions.

What is S3 lifecycle management?

Rules to automate transitioning objects between storage classes and expiring (deleting) objects after a policy-defined period to optimize storage costs.

What is S3 encryption at rest?

Encrypting stored objects using Server-Side Encryption (SSE-S3, SSE-KMS, SSE-C) or client-side encryption

What is S3 encryption in transit?

Protecting data during transfer using HTTPS/TLS to prevent eavesdropping or tampering while objects are uploaded or downloaded.

What is S3 access logging?

A feature that logs requests made to S3 buckets and objects (who accessed what and when), which can be stored in another bucket for auditing and analysis.

What is S3 Block Public Access?

A global setting and bucket-level option to prevent public access to buckets and objects, protecting against accidental exposure by blocking public ACLs and policies.

What is S3 Replication?

Automatic, configurable copying of objects and their metadata to another bucket, possibly in a different Region (Cross-Region Replication) for DR, compliance, or locality.

What is S3 Transfer Acceleration?

A feature that accelerates data transfers to S3 by using optimized network paths and CloudFront edge locations to reduce latency for long-distance uploads.

What is Amazon EBS?

Elastic Block Store provides persistent block-level storage volumes for use with EC2 instances, acting like network-attached hard drives with options for performance and durability.

What are EBS volume types?

Performance/price-optimized types including gp3 (general-purpose SSD), io2 (provisioned IOPS SSD), st1 (throughput-optimized HDD), and sc1 (cold HDD), each suited to different workloads.

What type of storage is EBS?

Block storage — used as disks for EC2 instances (OS/root volumes or additional volumes), providing low-latency storage for transactional workloads and databases.

What are EBS snapshots?

Point-in-time, incremental backups of EBS volumes stored in S3

Where are EBS volumes stored?

EBS volumes exist within a single Availability Zone and provide low-latency block storage for EC2 instances in that AZ

Can EBS volumes be attached to multiple EC2 instances?

Typically no — standard EBS volumes attach to one instance at a time

What is Amazon EFS?

Elastic File System is a fully managed, scalable NFS file system for Linux-based workloads that can be mounted concurrently by multiple EC2 instances across AZs and scales automatically as you add/remove files.

Can EFS be accessed by multiple EC2 instances?

Yes — EFS is designed for concurrent access from multiple instances across AZs, enabling shared file systems for web servers, analytics, and content management.

What workloads is EFS good for?

Use cases requiring shared, POSIX-compliant file storage like web serving, content management, home directories, big data analytics, and development environments.

What are the EFS storage classes?

EFS provides Standard and Infrequent Access (IA) storage classes to optimize cost — files automatically or manually moved between classes based on access patterns.

What is Amazon FSx?

A family of managed file systems optimized for specific use cases — including FSx for Windows File Server (Windows-native SMB) and FSx for Lustre (high-performance parallel file system for HPC and analytics).

What is FSx for Windows File Server?

A fully managed Windows-native file storage service providing SMB protocol support, Active Directory integration, and features for Windows-based applications and file shares.

What is FSx for Lustre?

A high-performance file system designed for compute-intensive workloads (HPC, machine learning, media processing) that provides low-latency parallel access and can be integrated with S3 for data throughput.

What is the AWS Snow Family?

A set of physical devices (Snowcone, Snowball Edge, Snowmobile) used to transfer large amounts of data to AWS offline (when network transfer is impractical) and to run edge compute tasks.

What is Snowcone?

A small, rugged, portable device for edge computing and secure data transfer for environments with limited bandwidth or remote locations

What is Snowball Edge?

A larger rugged device for moving terabytes to petabytes of data, optionally providing edge compute and storage capabilities

What is Snowmobile?

A 45-foot shipping container (truck) used to move exabyte-scale data to AWS — used in extremely large migrations where shipping physical storage is more practical than network transfer.

What is AWS Storage Gateway?

A hybrid cloud storage service that connects on-premises environments with AWS, offering File Gateway (NFS/SMB backed by S3), Volume Gateway (block storage with snapshots to S3), and Tape Gateway (virtual tapes backed by S3/Glacier) to integrate local apps with cloud storage.

What is File Gateway?

A Storage Gateway configuration that provides NFS/SMB file shares backed by S3 so on-prem applications can read/write files while data is stored and managed in S3.

What is Volume Gateway?

A Storage Gateway mode that presents iSCSI block volumes to on-premises applications while asynchronously backing up snapshots to S3 for recovery and migration.

What is Tape Gateway?

A virtual tape library solution in Storage Gateway that allows backup applications to store virtual tape data on S3/Glacier for long-term retention while preserving familiar tape workflows.