Anthony Lacruz
Hi! I know "EC2 storage" is used by my instances, but in my mental model I got that I can use S3 like EC2 storage, am I right? or they are for different scenarios?
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
Sign Up Free or Log In to participate!
EC2 Storages VS S3
Hi Anthony, from what I understand and I am happy to be correct, EC2 is basically a "Virtual Server, which includes virtual CPU, RAM and "Server" Storage (Elastic Block Store). I look at S3 more like an external storage device that you connect to your server to store bigger files/ back up that does not need I/O speeds of EC2’s defined "Server Memory" (Elastic Block Store). So EBS is faster, but more expensive than S3. I hope I have answered your question.
Also forgot to mention, your data stored on S3 is much more durable (less likely to be lost, compared to EBS)
Oh yeah, much better picture. I was thinking that since both are "storages" I could attach a S3 bucket in the same way as EBS to an EC2 instance
That’s great. I find that in AWS, so far atleast, there seem to be a lot of "duplicating" services. The trick is to try and distinguish, when to use the best service, given the results your are trying to achieve. Every duplicate service will have pros and cons, and you look for the pros vs cons all the time.
Perfect, that makes sense. Thanks Stepan!
The most important difference is that with S3 you mostly communicate via HTTP requests and you can’t mount/attach it onto your EC2 instance.