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AWS Storage Gateway

Updated Jul 26, 2020 ·
NOTES

This is not an exhaustive documentation of all the existing AWS Services. These are summarized notes that I used for the AWS Certifications.

To see the complete documentation, please go to: AWS documentation

Hybrid Cloud for Storage​

  • Hybrid cloud:

    • Part of a company's infrastructure is in the public cloud (like AWS)
    • Part of a company's infrastructure is on-premise

  • S3 is a proprietary storage technology (unlike EFS/NFS), it can be exposed to on-premise servers through a storage gateway

Storage Gateway​

Bridge between on-premise data and cloud data in S3

  • Uses cases for storage gateway with S3: disaster recovery, backup and restore, tiered storage.
  • AWS provides 3 types of storage gateways:

    • File Gateway

    • Volume Gateway

    • Tape Gateway

Types of Storage Gateway​

File Gateway​

  • Configured S3 buckets are accessible using NFS and SMB protocols

  • Supports S3 Standard, S3 IA, One Zone IA

  • Each buckets will have its own IAM roles in order to be accessed by the file gateway

  • Most recently used data is cached in the file gateway

  • File Gateway can be mounted on many servers (because of the NFS protocol)

Volume Gateway​

  • Block storage using iSCSI protocol backed by S3.

  • EBS snapshots are created time to time which are stored in S3, these will help use to restore un-premise volumes.

  • Volumes are usually mounter using iSCSI protocol, for on-premise it will look like a local volume.

Types:

  • Cached volumes: low latency access to the most recently used data.
  • Stored volumes: entire dataset is on premise, scheduled buckets are stored in S3.

Tape Gateway​

  • Some companies have backup processes using physical tapes.

  • With tape gateway these companies can use the same process, but the data will backed into the cloud.

  • Virtual Tape Library (VTL) backed by Amazon S3 and Glacier.

  • Backup processes using iSCSI interface will work as well with tape gateway.

File Gateway Hardware Appliance​

  • Using file gateway means we need virtualization, otherwise we can use a File Gateway Hardware Appliance

  • It is an actual hardware which can be bought from amazon.com

  • Helpful for daily NFS backup in small data centers