Types of Storage
Explore the different types of storage options together with their use cases in AWS.
Data is an important asset in technology, serving essential roles in various applications, from web and mobile applications to data analytics and machine learning. Beyond the inherent value of data, its organization is equally important. Understanding the optimal methods for storing data, ensuring efficient retrieval and seamless uploading is extremely important.
Three primary storage approaches—object, block, and file—play crucial roles in this landscape. Let's explore these storage types.
Object storage
Object storage is a data storage architecture that manages and organizes data as objects. Object storage does not organize data hierarchically with folders and directories. Instead, it employs a flat address space, making each object uniquely identifiable through a key or URL.
Objects are typically stored in a container-like structure, such as a bucket. We can toss anything from a JSON object to a confidential .xsl file inside a bucket. This means that the data does not need to be structured. However, to maintain a record, each object in this storage model consists of data, metadata, and a unique identifier.
