AWS: Cloud Storage Portfolio Review

AWS is the leader in global cloud services, and it offers enterprises a range of capabilities to store, access, protect, and analyze their data.

AWS cloud storage services offer feature sets designed to provide reliable, scalable, secure, and cost-efficient data storage based on different types of user needs.

See below to learn all about cloud storage by AWS:

See more: The Cloud Storage Market

AWS and the cloud storage market

The cloud storage market was worth $70.19 billion in 2021, and it is expected to be worth $376.37 billion by 2029, at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 24.% from 2022 to 2029. 

AWS is the market leader in cloud services, leading cloud infrastructure with 33% of the global market share. AWS reported revenue of $13.5 billion in the first quarter of 2021, an increase of 32% from $10.33 billion the year prior.

“Amazon continues to lead by a wide margin, but Microsoft, Google, and Alibaba all continue to grow more rapidly,” said John Dinsdale, chief analyst, Synergy Research Group. 

“The rising tide continues to lift all boats, but some are being lifted more swiftly than others.”

AWS cloud storage portfolio

These are some of AWS’ key cloud storage services:

• Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3): object storage management and monitoring; storage analytics and insights; storage classes; access management and security; data processing; query in place; and data transfer.
• Amazon Elastic File System (EFS): fully managed file storage; data protection; storage classes and life cycle management; security and compliance; scalable performance; shared file system with NFS v4.0 and v4.1 support; performance modes; throughput modes; encryption, containers and serverless file storage; and data transfer.
• Amazon FSx: hybrid-enabled, fully managed file storage.
• Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS): block storage volume types; data life cycle manager for snapshots; elastic volumes; optimized instances; encryption; and identity and access management (IAM).
• AWS Backup and AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery (DRS): backup and disaster recovery (DR) services.

AWS cloud storage benefits

• Faster access to storage: speed time to market, avoid complex capacity planning, and reduce over-provisioning.
• Reduce storage cost: pay-as-you-go approach and managed services minimize the total cost of ownership (TCO) and optimize storage and costs based on usage.
• Secure storage: supports security standards and compliance certifications to help customers satisfy regulatory requirements.
• Fuel innovation with new insights: use tools, such as big data analytics and machine learning (ML), to get more from data and accelerate new product and service delivery.

See more: Cloud Storage Security Best Practices

AWS cloud storage use cases

“With Lyft running on AWS since 2012, we take advantage of the extensive cloud infrastructure to support our exponential growth and support our goal of improving people’s lives with the world’s best transportation. Teams across the company use thousands of machines on Amazon EC2 and petabytes of data stored in Amazon S3 to ensure our users have the best experience possible.” -Chris Lambert, CTO, Lyft

“Amazon EFS fit the bill well as far as scalability and costs, and due to some great work from the Kubernetes community, there were already storage-class capabilities around the service.” -Brandon Harris, director of data science technology, Discover Financial Services

“We were able to easily support the jump from 30 billion records to 70 billion records a day because of the flexibility and scalability of Amazon S3 and Amazon Redshift.” -Robert Hunt, VP of software engineering, Nasdaq

User reviews of AWS cloud storage

AWS cloud storage services receive mostly positive reviews and recommendations at user review websites.

According to Gartner Peer Insights:

• Amazon S3: 4.7 out of 5, with 92% recommendation
• Amazon EFS: 4.8 out of 5, with 100% recommendation
• Amazon EBS: 4.4 out of 5, with 78% recommendation
• AWS Storage Gateway: 4.6 out of 5, with 86% recommendation
• N2WS Backup & Recovery for AWS: 4.5 out of 5, with 100% recommendation

Based on G2’s user reviews:

• Amazon S3: 4.6 out of 5
• Amazon EFS: 4.0 out of 5
• Amazon EBS: 4.5 out of 5
• AWS Storage Gateway: 4.4 out of 5

According to TrustRadius’ user reviews:

• Amazon S3: 9.0 out of 10
• Amazon EFS: 8.1 out of 10
• AWS Elastic Beanstalk: 8.5 out of 10
• Amazon EBS: 9.1 out of 10
• AWS Storage Gateway: 8.9 out of 10
• AWS Backup: 8.6 out of 10

AWS cloud storage pricing

AWS offers a pay-as-you-go approach for pricing for over 200 cloud services, allowing users to pay for the individual services based their requirements. AWS customers do not need to pay any additional costs or termination fees.

AWS users can explore over 100 products and start building on AWS using the Free Tier. It has three different types of free offerings, depending on the service used, including 12-Months Free, Always Free, and Free Trials.