AWS Storage Gateway

AWS is one of the most popular and leading Cloud company. This article provides information on different types of AWS storage gateway.

AWS Storage Gateway is a hybrid cloud storage service that enables on-premises access to virtually unlimited cloud storage. The applications connect to the service through a virtual machine or gateway hardware appliance using standard storage protocols, such as NFS, SMB, and iSCSI.

Benefits of using AWS storage gateway

1. Easy Deployment — Fast and easy deployment which enables to integrate with existing environments (like on-premise).
2. Ease of Maintenance — Helps reduce cost, maintenance, and scaling challenges associated with managing on-premises storage environments
3. Storage Protocols — Industry standard protocol support and connects local storage applications with NFS, SMB, iSCSI, or iSCSI-VTL
4. Cache Management — Option to maintain cache of recently written or read data for low-latency
5. Secure — secure data upload and download, encryption of data in transit using SSL
6. AWS Integrated — Integrates with other AWS services for storage, backup, and management
7. Availability — Highly available and protects data against hardware, hypervisor, or network failures

AWS Gateway Types

1. File Gateway

1. File interface that enables file storage as objects in Amazon S3
2. Industry-standard NFS and SMB file protocols
3. Supports all AWS S3 features — lifecycle management, Cross-Region Replication, secure access etc
4. Amazon CloudWatch logs can be used to get information about the health of file gateway and related resources.

2. Tape Gateway

1. Suitable for virtual tape storage to AWS S3/Glacier (archival/back-up solutions).
2. Tape Gateway is a virtual tape library (VTL) consisting of virtual tape drives and a virtual media changer to backup application using storage industry standard iSCSI protocol.
3. Compatible with most leading backup applications.
4. If retrieval not required or infrequently required, option to move the storage to Glacier/Glacier Archive.
5. Eliminates large upfront physical tape infrastructure capital expenses
6. Pay only for the capacity usage and scale as needs grow
7. Durable, highly available and secure
8. Available online for you to access and restore data any time

3. Volume Gateway

1. Block storage volumes using the iSCSI protocol
2. Asynchronous back-up as point-in-time snapshots of on-premise volumes
3. Stored in Amazon EBS snapshots
4. Incremental backups (except 1st time)
5. Can work as disaster recovery for on-premise application
6. Centralize backup management, reduction of operational burden, meet compliance requirements
7. Comes in 2 flavors — a) Stored Volume → The entire volume/storage present on-premise as well as cloud b) Cached Volume →Only cached(most frequent) volume/storage present on-premise and entire volume/storage present in AWS EBS.

Disclaimer —

AWS services offerings are fast paced and vast. I have tried my best to mention all AWS storage gateway with high-level features based on my learning. Users are welcome to get into depth @ aws.amazon.com

AWS keeps changing/adding features for each of its services. Please excuse if you see any discrepancies.