Amazon S3 vs EBS vs EFS

Home » AWS Cheat Sheets » AWS Comparison of Services » Amazon S3 vs EBS vs EFS

Amazon S3 vs EBS vs EFS

Last updated on April 10, 2023

 

S3

EBS

EFS

Type of storage

Object storage. You can store virtually any kind of data in any format.

Persistent block level storage for EC2 instances.

POSIX-compliant file storage for EC2 instances.

Features

Accessible to anyone or any service with the right permissions

Deliver performance for workloads that require the lowest-latency access to data from a single EC2 instance

Has a file system interface, file system access semantics (such as strong consistency and file locking), and concurrently-accessible storage for multiple EC2 instances

Max Storage Style 

Virtually unlimited 

16 TiB for one volume 

Unlimited system size

Max File Size

Individual Amazon S3 objects can range in size to a maximum of 5 terabytes.

Equivalent to the maximum size of your volumes

47.9 TiB for a single file

Performance (Latency)

Low, for mixed request types, and integration with CloudFront

Lowest, consistent; SSD-backed storages include the highest performance Provisioned OPS SSD and General Purpose SSD that balance price and performance.  

Low, consistent; use Max I/O mode for higher performance

Performance (Throughput)

Multiple GBs per second; supports multi-part upload

Up to 2 GB per second. HDD-backed volumes include throughput intensive workloads and Cold HDD for less frequently accessed data.

10+ GB per second. Bursting Throughput mode scales with the scales with the size of the file system. Provisioned throughput mode offers higher dedicated throughput than bustring throughput

Durability 

Stored redundantly across multiple AZs; has 99.999999999% durability 

Stored redundantly in a single AZ

Stored redundantly across multiple AZs

Availability 

S3 Standard – 99.99% availability S3 Standard-IA – 99.9% availability

S3 One Zone-IA – 99.5% availability.

S3 Intelligent Tiering – 99.9%

Has 99.999% availability

99.9% SLA. Runs in multi – AZ

Scalability

Highly scalable 

Manually increase/decrease your memory size. Attach and detach additional volumes to and from your EC2 instance to scale.

EFS file systems are elastic, and automatically grow and shrink as you add and remove files.

Data Accessing 

One to millions of connections over the wed; S3 provides a REST web services interface

Single EC2 instance in a single AZ 

Amazon EBS Multi-Attach a single Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1 or io2) volume to up to 16 Nitro-based instances that are in the same Availability Zone.

One to thousands of EC2 instances or on-premises servers, from multiple AZs, regions, VPCs, and accounts concurrently 

Access Control

Uses bucket policies and IAM user policies. Has Block Public Access settings to help manage public access to resources.

IAM Policies, Roles, and Security Groups 

Only resources that can access endpoints in your VPC, called a mount target, can access your file system; POSIX-compliant user and group-level permissions.

Encryption Methods 

Supports SSL endpoints using the HTTPS protocol, Client-Side and Server-Side Encryption (SSE-S3, SSE-C, SSE – KMS)

Encrypts both data-at-rest and data-in-transit through EBS encryption that uses AWS KMS CMKs.

Encrypt data at rest and in transit. Data at rest encryption uses AWS KMS. Data in transit uses TLS.

Backup and Restoration 

Use versioning or cross-region replication

All EBS volume types offer durable snapshot capabilities.

EFS to EFS replication through third party tools or AWS DataSynch 

Pricing

Billing prices are based on the location of your bucket. Lower costs equals lower prices. You get cheaper prices the more you use S3 storage.

You pay Gb-month of provisioned storage, provisioned IOPS-month, GB-month of snapshot data stored in S3

You pay more the amount of file system storage used per month. When using the Provisioned Throughput mode you pay for the throughput you provision per month.

Use Cases 

Web serving and content management, media and entertainment, backups, big data analytics, data lake

Boot volumes, transactional and NoSQL databases, data warehousing & ETL

Web serving and content management,enterprise applications, media and entertainment, home directories, database backups, developer tools, container storage, big data analytics

Service endpoint 

Can be accessed within and outside a VPC ( via S3 bucket URL)

Accessed within one’s VPC 

Accessed within one’s VPC

Additional notes:

  • S3 is cheaper than EBS and EFS in pure storage costs
  • EBS and EFS has higher performance than S3
  • EBS is meant to be used as volumes for EC2 instances
  • S3 does not have a hierarchy (flat environment) for files unlike EFS
  • Tutorials dojo strip
  • S3 has a built-in query feature
  • S3 offers strong consistency for all types of requests, except listing all buckets immediately after deleting a bucket, which is eventually consistent.

Tutorials Dojo portal

Be Inspired and Mentored with Cloud Career Journeys!

Tutorials Dojo portal

Enroll Now – Our Azure Certification Exam Reviewers

azure reviewers tutorials dojo

Enroll Now – Our Google Cloud Certification Exam Reviewers

Tutorials Dojo Exam Study Guide eBooks

tutorials dojo study guide eBook

FREE AWS Exam Readiness Digital Courses

Subscribe to our YouTube Channel

Tutorials Dojo YouTube Channel

FREE Intro to Cloud Computing for Beginners

FREE AWS, Azure, GCP Practice Test Samplers

Recent Posts

Written by: Jon Bonso

Jon Bonso is the co-founder of Tutorials Dojo, an EdTech startup and an AWS Digital Training Partner that provides high-quality educational materials in the cloud computing space. He graduated from Mapúa Institute of Technology in 2007 with a bachelor's degree in Information Technology. Jon holds 10 AWS Certifications and is also an active AWS Community Builder since 2020.

AWS, Azure, and GCP Certifications are consistently among the top-paying IT certifications in the world, considering that most companies have now shifted to the cloud. Earn over $150,000 per year with an AWS, Azure, or GCP certification!

Follow us on LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, or join our Slack study group. More importantly, answer as many practice exams as you can to help increase your chances of passing your certification exams on your first try!

View Our AWS, Azure, and GCP Exam Reviewers Check out our FREE courses

Our Community

~98%
passing rate
Around 95-98% of our students pass the AWS Certification exams after training with our courses.
200k+
students
Over 200k enrollees choose Tutorials Dojo in preparing for their AWS Certification exams.
~4.8
ratings
Our courses are highly rated by our enrollees from all over the world.

What our students say about us?