Introduction

For many organizations, their most valuable asset is their data. But organizations often have their data split between the cloud and on-premises locations such as offices and data centers. It’s therefore critical to understand the different options AWS provides for storing data in the cloud, transferring data between the cloud and on-premises, and doing both in a cost-effective way without sacrificing performance.

In this chapter, you’ll learn about the following AWS services that answer these challenges:

• Simple Storage Service (S3)—Amazon’s flagship cloud storage service that lets you store and retrieve unlimited amounts of data. Because it’s part of the AWS ecosystem, data in S3 is available to other AWS services, including EC2, making it easy to keep storage and compute together for optimal performance.
• S3 Glacier—Offers long-term archiving of infrequently accessed data, such as backups that must be retained for many years.
• AWS...