AWS: S3 vs EFS vs EBS

Elastic Block Store

• Used as per-instance storage (usually paired with EC2).
• Data is stored in equally-sized blocks.
• Lower latency — 16000 IOPS for General SSD and up to 256000 IOPS for provisioned IOPS SSD.
• EBS encryption, High availability and easy backup.

Elastic File System

• Can be mounted by multiple instances.
• Highly scalable — Can grow or shrink as per demand.
• Adaptive throughput — Can reach up to 500000 IOPS.
• Fully elastic — No need to provision new infrastructure.
• Can cross AWS region boundary using VPC peering.
• Great for CMS, Application development, for storing code and media files.

Simple Storage Service

• Can be accessed from multiple instances.
• Data is organized hierarchically.
• More comprehensive metadata labels makes querying easier.
• Great for Data lakes, archiving files for long-term, and hosting static websites.
• Lower cost as compared to EFS and EBS.
• Highly available, Durable, and Flexible.