AWS S3 and AWS storage gateway

Question

i am bit confused between AWS S3 and AWS storage gateway as both functions the same of storing data.Can anyone explain me with example of what is the exact difference between two services offered by Amazon

Answer 1

• AWS S3 is the data repository
• AWS Storage Gateway connects on premise storage to the S3 repository.

You would use Storage Gateway for a number of reasons

1. You want to stop purchasing storage devices, and use S3 to back your enterprise storage. In this case, your company would save to a location defined on the storage gateway device, which would then handle local caching, and offload the less frequently accessed data to S3.
2. You want to use it as a back up system - whereby Storage Gateway would snap shot the data into S3
3. To take advantage of the newly released virtual tape library - which would alloy you to transition from tape storage to S3/Glacier storage, without losing your existing tape software and cataloging investment.

Answer 2

1, AWS S3 is a file system. It acts as network disk. For people has no cloud experience, you can treat it as dropbox.
2, AWS Storage Gateway is an virtual interface (or in practice, it is a virtual pc running on your server) which allow you read/write data from/to aws S3 or other aws storage service transparently

You can assume S3 is dropbox itself, you can access it through web or api, and AWS Storage Gateway is the dropbox client on your pc, which simulate the dropbox as your local drive (actually a network drive in the real case).

Answer 3

I think, the above answers are enough explanatory. But here's just a check

Why would I use Storing data on AWS S3?

1. Easy to use
2. Cost-effective
3. Long durability and availability
4. No limitation for storing amount of data. Only thing is - Data object should not be more than 5 TB

Why would I use AWS Storage Gateway?

1. I have large amount of data or important data that is stored in data centre and I want to store on Cloud (AWS) for "obvious" reasons
2. I need a mechanism to transfer my important data from data centre to AWS S3
3. I need to store my old and "not-so-useful" but "may-be-needed-in-future" type data so I will store it on AWS Glacier
4. Now, I need a mechanism to implement this successfully. AWS Storage gateway is provided to fulfil this requirement.

AWS Storage Gateway will provide you a VM which will be installed on your data centre and will transfer that data.

That's it. (y)