AWS Storage for Cloud Engineers
Learn AWS storage services: choose and run S3, EBS, EFS, FSx, and transfer tools like DataSync for real production workloads.
What You'll Learn
Understanding How to Choose the Right AWS Storage
Why storage choice is a system design decision Your storage choice decides how your app behaves under load, not just where bytes live.
Working with Amazon S3 Fundamentals
What makes S3 different from a filesystem S3 is an object store: every item lives in a flat bucket under a key, and you read or write it with an API...
Securing and Serving Data from S3
How S3 access control layers work S3 access is decided by several policy layers, and a request must pass all of them.
Protecting and Reacting to S3 Data
Versioning as your undo button Versioning does not prevent mistakes. It gives you a way back from them.
Understanding EBS Block Storage
What EBS is and why it is tied to one AZ EBS is a virtual disk that attaches to an EC2 instance over the AWS network, and that network hop is both...
Sharing Files Across Servers with EFS
Why EBS breaks for multi-server uploads EBS gives one instance a private drive, so it fails the moment several servers need the same files.
Skills You'll Master
Curriculum Index10 topics
Understanding How to Choose the Right AWS Storage
Why storage choice is a system design decision Your storage choice decides how your app behaves under load, not just...
Working with Amazon S3 Fundamentals
What makes S3 different from a filesystem S3 is an object store: every item lives in a flat bucket under a key, and you...
Securing and Serving Data from S3
How S3 access control layers work S3 access is decided by several policy layers, and a request must pass all of them.
Protecting and Reacting to S3 Data
Versioning as your undo button Versioning does not prevent mistakes. It gives you a way back from them.
Understanding EBS Block Storage
What EBS is and why it is tied to one AZ EBS is a virtual disk that attaches to an EC2 instance over the AWS network...
Sharing Files Across Servers with EFS
Why EBS breaks for multi-server uploads EBS gives one instance a private drive, so it fails the moment several servers...
Knowing When You Need FSx, Gateways, and Transfer Tools
FSx at awareness level FSx runs well-known file systems as a managed service, for teams that need something EFS does...
Choosing Storage by Workload
Mapping common workloads to services Match the access pattern first, then confirm with cost and durability needs.
Running the Hands-On Lab: Storage Across S3, EBS, and EFS
Before you start This lab builds a versioned S3 bucket, an EBS volume with a snapshot, and an EFS file system mounted...
Quick Reference and Common Mistakes
Quick reference Common mistakes Putting irreplaceable data in S3 One Zone-IA is the costliest mistake here.
Career Impact
Roles that use the skills in this module.
Cloud Engineer
DevOps Engineer
Solutions Architect
Next Modules
Related Guides
Practice on the Coding Sheet
Not a software engineer sheet. Every problem comes from real DevOps, SRE, Platform and Cloud interviews, from your first script to a system you build yourself.
Open the Coding SheetFrequently Asked Questions
S3 is object storage that you reach over an HTTP API. EBS is a block disk that attaches to one EC2 instance in one Availability Zone. EFS is a shared Linux file system that many instances mount at the same time.
Start with S3 Standard for active data. If you cannot predict access, S3 Intelligent-Tiering moves objects between tiers for you. Move to Infrequent Access or Glacier classes only when you know the access pattern and the minimum storage durations fit.
An EBS volume lives inside one Availability Zone and is reached over that zone's network. To use the data in another AZ, take a snapshot and create a new volume from it in the target zone.
For nearly all new workloads, yes. gp3 sets IOPS and throughput independently of volume size and usually costs less per GB. gp2 ties IOPS to size, so more speed means buying more space.