AWS Storage Gateway

AWS Storage Gateway

Before going to learn about AWS storage gateway let’s consider a scenario,

Assume our application runs in an on-premises environment.  On-premise setups are well-known for being outdated platforms for operating and delivering applications. We may therefore conclude that hosting and deploying the application in the cloud is preferable. However, certain of our programs must continue to run locally. For instance, we might want to avoid the expenses and labor of migrating our application to the cloud or we might be required by legislation in some countries to store user data and applications locally. Because of this, AWS provides us with hybrid cloud storage options like AWS Storage Gateway.

Definition: AWS Storage Gateway is a hybrid cloud storage service that gives a simple way to integrate our data centers and remote offices with low latency access to cloud storage.

Without changing our local applications, we may exploit the advantages of cloud storage, such as essentially endless capacity, great scalability, and performance, from our on-premises servers. When moving our applications to the cloud, we must make numerous changes to them. We, for instance, have file storage in our neighborhood data center. How can we combine it with the object storage service S3 from AWS? The AWS storage gateway offers the solution. The ability to use S3 as file, block, and object storage as well as object storage is one of the key characteristics of the AWS storage gateway. There is no need to modify our application.

AWS storage gateway offers three interfaces:

1.     File Gateway

2.     Volume Gateway

3.     Tape Gateway.

Figure: AWS Storage Gateway Interfaces

1.     File Gateway: File Gateway is a configuration of the AWS Storage Gateway service that offers an interface to store files (Flat files like word, pdf, pictures, videos, etc.) as objects in Amazon S3 buckets, accessed through a using a Network File System (NFS) mount point.

·        The metadata (Ownership, rights, timestamps, etc.) of the object associated with each file stored in S3 is also stored.

·        Once files or objects have been uploaded to an S3 bucket, you may manage them using S3's features like versioning, lifecycle management, and cross-region replication.

·        Use cases of File Gateway:

                     Migrating on-premises application to cloud.

        Backing up our local data more affordably on the cloud.

        Data analysis using AWS services like serverless functions, big data analytics, or    machine learning.

2.     Volume Gateway: Our on-premises storage volumes are available as Amazon EBS Snapshots through Volume Gateway, which you may utilise for backup, disaster recovery, and migration. To provide our on-premises applications with cloud-based iSCSI block storage volumes, you can set up the AWS Storage Gateway service as a volume gateway.

3.     Tape Gateway: In order to avoid the installation, scalability, and maintenance of a physical tape infrastructure, the AWS Storage Gateway service can be set up to function as a Virtual Tape Library (VTL) that scales seamlessly with your business demands.

AWS storage gateway architecture:

As far as we can tell, AWS storage gateway offers a quick and simple option for us to leverage cloud storage on-site while minimising changes to our current applications and storage setup. By seamlessly integrating on-premises applications with AWS storage, the solution reduces our need for on-premises storage.

Storage Gateway consists of 2 parts.

1.     One is the gateway that typically runs on the virtual machine or hardware appliances in our facility.

2.     The other is the service running in the cloud to which the on-premises gateway connects to.

Figure: Storage Gateway Architecture

 The Gateway provides storage protocol interfaces while residing in our environment. This indicates that we can connect to it without having to completely rewrite and redesign the programme. These on-premises applications and workloads are then connected to AWS storage services by the gateway. This enables us to save our data securely and stably in an Amazon EBS snapshot, Amazon S3, Amazon S3 glacier, or Amazon S3 glacier deep archive.

Common use cases of AWS storage gateway

1.     Move backups and archives to AWS cloud: We can store and maintain our backups away from on-premise hardware when using the AWS storage gateway because AWS offers boundless capacity. We must transfer our files from the storage gateway to AWS rather than purchasing hardware and using it manually for backups. Backup and archive maintenance may be extremely affordable and effective with services like glacier and glacier deep archive.

2.     Reduce the size of on-premise storage: Storage gateway has this very clear advantage. When we store the data on AWS, we lower the size of local storage. For instance, only frequently requested data is kept locally when we use a volume gateway in cached mode. Hence decreasing the size of local storage.

3.     Low latency access to data stored in AWS: Our frequently accessed files are kept on local devices through the storage gateway. Therefore, despite the fact that our data is housed on AWS, we can still access it directly and quickly. One effective technique to access data stored on S3 is through Amazon File Gateway.

Conclusion: From this article people can understand what is aws storage gateway? How it is used? What are the parts of storage gateway? And so many things.