Physical Infrastructure: Storage

What is cloud storage?

Cloud storage is a way of storing data with a third party on their remote servers that can be accessed over the Internet. It simplifies data management and offers on-demand storage capacity in a cost-effective manner. It eliminates infrastructure management aspects for companies. We get global scale, durable, highly available, and robust data access anywhere and anytime.

Requirements

When we talk about cloud storage, there are certain characteristics that we need. Since storage is a fundamental component of any software application, it's important that we can access the data we store at all times. Let's discuss these requirements.

Durability

Durability means the ability of any material or object to withstand wear, pressure, and damage. In the context of the cloud, durability is used to measure the likelihood of data loss. It's measured in percentage. For example, Amazon S3 standard tier offers 99.999999999% (11 nines) durability of storage objects over a given year, Microsoft Azure offers the durability of 12 nines and even up to 16 nines for some services, whereas AWS and Google cloud offers 11 nines durability for their storage services.

Note: 11 9's of annual durability means with 1 billion objects, you can go 100 years without loosing a single object!

Cloud vendors achieve durability by making multiple copies of data, a process we call redundancy. The chance of all copies going corrupt or lost is reduced by replicating data at multiple places. For most cloud platforms, the default option is to make three copies of any data stored (often in the same data center). We can increase the durability ...