Amazon AWS recently concluded AWS Storage Day. This is the second edition of the annual event organised by the company where several major announcements related to new launches of product and service updates were made. This year, Amazon made a multitude of announcements regarding the AWS Storage services. In this article, we will explore a few of the significant ones.
Automatic Data Archiving
Two new optimisations for Intelligent-Tiering storage class of Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) have been announced. It now supports automatic data archiving to Archive Access and Deep Archive Access storage tiers. These optimisations will help in reducing the amount of manual work needed to archive passive objects with unpredictable access patterns.
Upon activation of these archive access tiers, the S3 Intelligent-Tiering will automatically move the objects to either Archive Access and Deep Archive Access. Objects that have been unused for 90 days will be moved to Archive Access, and after 180 days of being not accessed, this object will be moved to Deep Archive Access.
More details can be found here.
Prevention of Storage Overload
Amazon FSx for Lustre is a fully managed service that gives high-performance storage for compute overloads at a reasonable price. Lustre is one of the world’s most superior high-performance file systems. With FSx for Lustre, users can expect sub-millisecond latencies, the throughput of up to hundreds of gigabytes per second, and millions of Input/Output Operations Per Second (IOPS).
As per the new update, it will be possible for a user to set, monitor, and enforce storage quotas on FSx for Lustre using native Lustre commands. This will enable multiple users to share a single file system without exceeding the storage beyond the threshold. This is because Amazon FSx enforces quotas. For users who exceed the quota, they are forced to delete enough files to get under the limits.
More details can be found here.
User-Friendly File Sharing
Amazon FSx for Windows File Server is file storage, built on Windows server, that is accessible over industry standard Server Message Block (SMB) protocol. As per the new update, the file shares can be accessed through user-friendly DNS aliases. This allows users to move data to the cloud without any code or configuration changes.
More details can be found here.
Fully-Automated Data Transfers
Users can now use AWS DataSync to undertake fully-automated data transfers between datasets stored on Amazon S3, Amazon EFS, or Amazon FSx for Windows File Server. From now on, there will be no requirement for deploying DataSync agents. Apart from easy creation and scheduling of data transfer, this function provides facilities such as automatic encryption of data-in-transit, data integrity verification, and granular visibility into the transfer process, for datasets spanning across millions of files or objects and over multiple AWS Regions.
Find more details here.
Increased Scalability, Security & Ease Of Use
Users will now be able to create Tape and Volume Gateway for storing caches up to 64 terabytes in size; this is four times larger than previously permissible. This allows users to keep the data closer for on-premise applications. Another newly added feature allows for users to control maximum network bandwidth consumption by Tape and Volume Gateways.
Further, to initiate automated workflows, Amazon CloudWatch or Amazon EventBridge notifications can be enabled in case of new uploads to the File Gateway. This helps in easy processing of on-premise file data and other even targets. To maintain confidentiality, File Gateway now supports access-based enumeration. It means that users will only be able to see SMB file shares, files, and folders to which they have permission.
More details can be found here, here, and here.
Policy-Driven Backup Plans
AWS now offers the capability to create policy-based backup plans for Amazon FSx file systems through AWS Backup. This functionality can also be used for Amazon FSx for Windows File Server file systems, and Amazon FSx for Lustre file systems that are not linked to S3 or another data repository.
Read more here.
Wrapping Up
Apart from the above-mentioned announcements, the AWS Storage Day 2020 saw the introduction of several other features including – AWS Snow Family, AWS Transfer Family, Amazon Elastic File Systems, and Amazon Elastic Block Store.
