S3 Storage Gateways

Question 1

What is the idea behind Amazon Storage Gateway?

Answer 1

Connecting an on-premises software app with cloud-based storage for smart storage (mixing cloud storage and on-premises storage).

Question 2

What are the three types of Amazon Storage Gateways?

Answer 2

• File Gateway
• Volume Gateway
• Gateway Virtual Tape Library

Question 3

How do data backups work in Amazon Storage Gateways?

Answer 3

• Data is backed up asynchronously to S3 in the form of EBS Snapshots

Question 4

What does NFS stand for?

Answer 4

Network File System

Question 5

How are files stored in Amazon File Gateway?

Answer 5

• Files are stored as S3 buckets
• Once objects are transferred to S3, they get managed as native S3 objects, and bucket policies apply directly to them.

Question 6

How are files accessed in an Amazon File Gateway?

Answer 6

Files are accessed through an NFS mount point

Question 7

What are the two types of Amazon Volume Gateways? In what key ways do they differ?

Answer 7

• Storage Volumes let you keep all of your data on premises (thus on-premise data is the primary storage)
• Cached Volumes let you keep your frequently accessed data on-premises (thus S3 is your primary data storage)

Question 8

At a high level, what do Amazon Stored Volumes do?

Answer 8

• Store primary data locally, while asynchronously backing it up to AWS

Question 9

What is the high-level benefit of Amazon Stored Volumes?

Answer 9

• On-premises applications get low latency access to their entire datasets.
• AND you get durable, off-site backups

Question 10

At a high level, how do Amazon Cached Volumes work?

Answer 10

• Lets you use S3 as your primary data storage while retaining frequently accessed data in your storage gateway.

Question 11

What is the high-level benefit of Amazon Cached Volumes?

Answer 11

It minimizes the need to scale on-premises storage

Question 12

Suppose you are worried about your data storage capacity and need a “quick win” moving from on-premises to cloud. Which gateway volume solution is more appropriate? Why?

Answer 12

Cached Gateway, because you dont need to scale your current storage to use it

Question 13

How can you bring a system that runs on tapes into Amazon S3?

Answer 13

Use amazon’s Virtual Tape Library (VTL)