Introduction
AWS S3 (including S3 Glacier) can provide very cheap object storage for some on-premise backup and archiving use cases. But, be careful. There are some pitfalls:
- S3 is an object store, not a file system. You will need to make sure that the tools you use to accomplish backup/archive are S3-savvy.
- Since S3 is not a file system, some features you might expect are missing or can be costly to replicate.
- E.g., it costs money just to get the MD5 hash or creation date for an S3 object. It's not much money, but it can add up when dealing with hundreds of thousands or millions of objects.
- S3 storage can be very cheap indeed, but you need to be careful that the tools you are using don't end up costing you a lot for S3 API operations used for checking object hashes and collecting other metadata from objects.
- There are a lot of pathways to get on-premise files to S3 or other AWS services. Picking the right one will depend on your use case, budget, ability or desire to tinker and monitor costs, palatability of deploying additional on-premises resources (e.g., DataSync, Storage Gateway) to make things easier.
Anti-Patterns
Data Already in AWS
Don't try to role-your own backup/archive solution if your data is already in AWS. Use built-in AWS services and features:
- AWS Backup
- EBS Snapshots
- RDS Snapshots
- S3 Replication
- ...
Resources
Internal
External