Whitepaper

AWS Storage Options – EBS & Instance Store

~ Last updated on : ~ jayendrapatil ~ 7 Comments

AWS Storage Options – EBS & Instance Store

  • Elastic Block Store – EBS and Instance Store provide block-level storage options for EC2 instances.

Elastic Block Store (EBS) volume

  • EBS provides durable block-level storage for use with EC2 instances
  • EBS volumes are off-instance, network-attached storage (NAS) that persists independently from the running life of a single EC2 instance.
  • EBS volume is attached to an instance and can be used as a physical hard drive, typically by formatting it with the file system of your choice and using the file I/O interface provided by the instance operating system.
  • EBS volume can be used to boot an EC2 instance (EBS-root AMIs only), and multiple EBS volumes can be attached to a single EC2 instance.
  • EBS volume can be attached to a single EC2 instance only at any point in time.
  • EBS Multi-Attach volume can be attached to multiple EC2 instances (up to 16 Nitro-based instances in the same AZ). Multi-Attach is supported on io1 and io2 Block Express volumes.
  • EBS provides the ability to take point-in-time snapshots, which are persisted in S3. These snapshots can be used to instantiate new EBS volumes and to protect data for long-term durability
  • EBS snapshots can be copied across AWS regions as well, making it easier to leverage multiple AWS regions for geographical expansion, data center migration, and disaster recovery
  • All EBS volume types are designed for 99.999% availability.

EBS Volume Types

  • Amazon EBS provides six volume types divided into two major categories:
    • SSD-backed storage for transactional workloads (databases, virtual desktops, boot volumes)
    • HDD-backed storage for throughput-intensive workloads (MapReduce, log processing)
  • General Purpose SSD (gp3) — baseline 3,000 IOPS and 125 MiB/s at any size; scales up to 64 TiB, 80,000 IOPS, and 2,000 MiB/s (enhanced Sep 2025). Performance provisioned independently of capacity. 99.8%-99.9% durability.
  • General Purpose SSD (gp2) — burstable performance tied to volume size (3 IOPS/GiB, up to 16,000 IOPS). Being superseded by gp3 for new workloads.
  • Provisioned IOPS SSD (io2 Block Express) — highest performance block storage: up to 256,000 IOPS, 4,000 MiB/s throughput, 64 TiB capacity, sub-millisecond latency. 99.999% durability (100X more durable than gp3). Supports Multi-Attach and NVMe reservations for shared storage fencing.
  • Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1) — previous generation Provisioned IOPS; up to 64,000 IOPS and 1,000 MiB/s. 99.8%-99.9% durability.
  • Throughput Optimized HDD (st1) — low-cost HDD for frequently accessed, throughput-intensive workloads; up to 500 MiB/s. Cannot be a boot volume.
  • Cold HDD (sc1) — lowest cost HDD for less frequently accessed workloads; up to 250 MiB/s. Cannot be a boot volume.
  • Magnetic (standard) — previous generation volume type with lower performance. AWS recommends migrating to current generation volume types.

Ideal Usage Patterns

  • EBS is meant for data that changes relatively frequently and requires long-term persistence.
  • EBS volume provides access to raw block-level storage and is particularly well-suited for use as the primary storage for a database or file system
  • EBS Provisioned IOPS volumes (io2 Block Express) are particularly well-suited for use with databases applications that require a high and consistent rate of random disk reads and writes, such as Oracle, SAP HANA, Microsoft SQL Server, and SAS Analytics.
  • gp3 volumes are ideal for a wide variety of workloads including virtual desktops, medium-sized databases, development/test environments, and boot volumes.
  • st1 volumes are ideal for big data, data warehouses, and log processing.
  • sc1 volumes are ideal for infrequently accessed cold data requiring lowest storage cost.

Anti-Patterns

  • Temporary Storage
    • EBS volume persists independent of the attached EC2 life cycle.
    • For temporary storage such as caches, buffers, queues, etc it is better to use local instance store volumes, SQS, or ElastiCache
  • Highly-durable storage
    • For highly durable storage, use S3 or Glacier which provides 99.999999999% (11 9’s) annual durability per object. EBS io2 Block Express offers 99.999% durability, while gp3/gp2/io1 offer 99.8%-99.9% durability.
  • Static data or web content
    • For static web content, where data infrequently changes, EBS with EC2 would require a web server to serve the pages.
    • S3 may represent a more cost-effective and scalable solution for storing this fixed information and is served directly out of S3.

EBS Performance

  • EBS provides multiple volume types that differ in performance characteristics and pricing, allowing you to tailor storage performance and cost to application needs.
  • EBS Volumes can be attached and striped across multiple similarly-provisioned EBS volumes using RAID 0 or logical volume manager software, thus aggregating available IOPS, total volume throughput, and total volume size.
  • gp3 volumes offer cost-effective storage with independently configurable IOPS and throughput. Baseline: 3,000 IOPS and 125 MiB/s; scalable up to 80,000 IOPS and 2,000 MiB/s (as of Sep 2025).
  • io2 Block Express volumes deliver predictable, high performance for I/O intensive workloads: up to 256,000 IOPS, 4,000 MiB/s throughput, with sub-millisecond latency. Supports 1,000 IOPS per GB provisioned.
  • As EBS volumes are network-attached devices, other network I/O performed by the instance, as well as the total load on the shared network, can affect individual EBS volume performance.
  • EBS-optimized instances deliver dedicated throughput between EC2 and EBS. Latest Nitro-based instances (e.g., C8gn, M8gn, R8gn in 48xlarge/metal sizes) support up to 120 Gbps EBS bandwidth and 480,000 IOPS (as of Apr 2026).
  • Each separate EBS volume can be configured independently with its own type and performance settings.

EBS Durability & Availability

  • EBS volumes are designed to be highly available and reliable.
  • EBS volume data is replicated across multiple servers in a single AZ to prevent the loss of data from the failure of any single component.
  • All EBS volume types are designed for 99.999% availability.
  • io2 Block Express volumes provide 99.999% durability (0.001% annual failure rate) — 100X more durable than other volume types.
  • gp3, gp2, and io1 volumes provide 99.8%-99.9% durability (0.1%-0.2% annual failure rate).
  • EBS snapshots are incremental, point-in-time backups, containing only the data blocks changed since the last snapshot.
  • Frequent snapshots are recommended to maximize both the durability and availability of EBS data.
  • EBS snapshots provide an easy-to-use disk clone or disk image mechanism for backup, sharing, and disaster recovery.

EBS Snapshots Archive

  • EBS Snapshots Archive offers up to 75% lower snapshot storage costs for snapshots stored for 90 days or longer that are rarely accessed.
  • Snapshots in the standard tier are incremental; when archived, they are converted to full snapshots and moved to the archive tier.
  • Archived snapshots can be restored to the standard tier when needed (restoration takes 24-72 hours).
  • AWS Backup now supports EBS Snapshots Archive in backup policies for automated lifecycle management.
  • EBS now displays full snapshot size information in Console and via DescribeSnapshots API (full-snapshot-size-in-bytes field, Feb 2025).

EBS Elastic Volumes

  • Elastic Volumes allows you to dynamically increase capacity, tune performance, and change the type of live volumes with no downtime or performance impact.
  • EBS volumes can be resized dynamically (increased only, cannot be reduced in size).
  • As of Jan 2026, EBS supports up to 4 Elastic Volumes modifications per volume within a rolling 24-hour window (previously limited to 1 modification per 6 hours).
  • Modifications include: increasing size, changing volume type, and adjusting provisioned performance (IOPS/throughput).

EBS Cost Model

  • EBS pricing varies by volume type:
    • gp3: charged per GB-month of provisioned storage, plus separately for provisioned IOPS (above 3,000) and throughput (above 125 MiB/s)
    • gp2: charged per GB-month of provisioned storage (IOPS included based on size)
    • io2/io1: charged per GB-month of provisioned storage and per Provisioned IOPS-month
    • st1/sc1: charged per GB-month of provisioned storage
  • EBS snapshots are charged per GB-month of data stored. Snapshots are incremental and compressed, so storage used is generally much less than volume size.
  • EBS Snapshots Archive tier costs up to 75% less than standard snapshot storage (minimum 90-day retention).
  • EBS snapshot copy is charged for data transferred between regions, plus standard snapshot charges in the destination region.
  • EBS volume storage capacity is allocated at creation time, and you are charged for allocated storage even if not fully used.

EBS Scalability and Elasticity

  • EBS volumes can easily and rapidly be provisioned and released to scale in and out with changing storage demands.
  • EBS volumes can be resized dynamically using Elastic Volumes (increase only, cannot be reduced).
  • Volume type and performance can be changed without detaching the volume or stopping the instance.
  • Up to 4 modifications are allowed per 24-hour rolling window.

Interfaces

  • AWS offers management APIs for EBS through REST-based APIs, AWS CLI, and SDKs, which can be used to create, delete, describe, attach, and detach EBS volumes, as well as to create, delete, and describe snapshots and copy snapshots across regions.
  • Amazon also offers the same capabilities through the AWS Management Console.
  • EBS Direct APIs allow you to read and write data directly to/from EBS snapshots without needing to attach them to an instance — useful for backup, disaster recovery, and data migration.

Instance Store Volumes

  • Instance Store volumes are also referred to as Ephemeral Storage.
  • Instance Store volumes provide temporary block-level storage and consist of a preconfigured and pre-attached block of disk storage on the same physical server as the EC2 instance.
  • Instance storage amount depends on the Instance type; larger instances provide both more and larger instance store volumes.
  • Modern instance store volumes use NVMe SSD storage on Nitro-based instances, delivering high random I/O performance with low latency.
  • Latest generation storage-optimized instances (2025-2026):
    • C8gd, M8gd, R8gd (Graviton4): up to 11.4 TB of NVMe SSD local storage, 3X more than previous generation
    • C8id, M8id, R8id (Intel Xeon 6): up to 22.8 TB of NVMe SSD local storage, 3X more than 6th-gen instances
  • Instance store volumes, unlike EBS volumes, cannot be detached or attached to another instance.
  • Data on instance store volumes persists only during the life of the associated EC2 instance — data is lost when the instance stops, terminates, or the underlying hardware fails.

Ideal Usage Patterns

  • EC2 local instance store volumes are fast, free (included in the price of the EC2 instance) “scratch volumes” best suited for storing temporary data that is continually changing, such as buffers, caches, scratch data, or data that is replicated for durability.
  • NVMe SSD-backed instances are ideally suited for many high performance database workloads. e.g., NoSQL databases like Cassandra, MongoDB, and real-time analytics.
  • High storage instances support much higher storage density per EC2 instance and are ideally suited for applications that benefit from high sequential I/O performance across very large datasets. e.g., data warehouses, Hadoop/Spark storage nodes, distributed file systems.
  • Machine learning training workloads that need fast local scratch storage for datasets and checkpoints.

Anti-Patterns

  • Persistent storage
    • For persistent virtual disk storage similar to a physical disk drive for files or other data that must persist longer than the lifetime of a single EC2 instance, EBS volumes or S3 are more appropriate.
  • Relational database storage
    • In most cases, relational databases require storage that persists beyond the lifetime of a single EC2 instance, making EBS volumes the natural choice.
  • Shared storage
    • Instance store volumes are dedicated to a single EC2 instance, and cannot be shared with other systems or users.
    • If you need storage that can be detached from one instance and attached to a different instance, or if you need the ability to share data easily, EBS volumes, EFS, or S3 are better choices.
  • Snapshots
    • If you need the convenience, long-term durability, availability, and shareability of point-in-time disk snapshots, EBS volumes are a better choice.

Instance Store Performance

  • EC2 instance virtual machine and the local instance store volumes are located on the same physical server, providing very fast access with low latency, particularly for sequential access.
  • Because the bandwidth to the disks is not limited by the network, aggregate sequential throughput for multiple instance volumes can be higher than for the same number of EBS volumes.
  • NVMe SSD instance store volumes provide from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of low-latency, random 4 KB IOPS.
  • To further increase aggregate IOPS or improve sequential disk throughput, multiple instance store volumes can be grouped together using RAID 0 (disk striping) software.
  • High storage instances are capable of delivering multi-GB/sec sequential read and write performance.
  • AWS provides detailed NVMe statistics for instance store volumes to help optimize latency-sensitive workloads (available 2025).

Instance Store Durability and Availability

  • EC2 local instance store volumes are NOT intended to be used as durable disk storage.
  • Data persists only during the life of the associated EC2 instance.
  • Data is lost when: instance is stopped or terminated, underlying disk drive fails, or instance hibernates.
  • Always replicate important data to EBS, S3, or other durable storage.

Cost Model

  • Cost of the EC2 instance includes any local instance store volumes if the instance type provides them.
  • While there is no additional charge for data storage on local instance store volumes, data transferred to and from instance store volumes from other AZs or outside an EC2 region may incur data transfer charges.
  • Additional charges apply for any persistent storage used (S3, Glacier, EBS volumes, EBS snapshots).

Scalability and Elasticity

  • Local instance store volumes are tied to a particular EC2 instance and are fixed in number and size for a given EC2 instance type.
  • Scalability and elasticity of this storage are tied to the number of EC2 instances running.

Interfaces

  • Instance store volumes are specified using the block device mapping feature of the EC2 API and the AWS Management Console.
  • To the EC2 instance, an instance store volume appears just like a local disk drive. Use the native file system I/O interfaces of the chosen operating system to read and write data.
  • On Nitro-based instances, instance store volumes are exposed as NVMe block devices.

EBS vs Instance Store Comparison

Feature EBS Instance Store
Persistence Persists independently of instance Ephemeral — lost on stop/terminate
Network Network-attached Physically attached (local)
Snapshots Supported (incremental, cross-region) Not supported
Boot volume Yes No (legacy only)
Resize Yes (Elastic Volumes) Fixed per instance type
Max IOPS 256,000 (io2 Block Express) Millions (NVMe, instance-dependent)
Max size per volume 64 TiB Instance-type dependent (up to 22.8 TB)
Durability 99.999% (io2) / 99.8-99.9% (others) None — ephemeral
Multi-Attach Yes (io1/io2, up to 16 instances) No
Cost Pay per provisioned GB + IOPS/throughput Included in instance price

AWS Certification Exam Practice Questions

  • Questions are collected from Internet and the answers are marked as per my knowledge and understanding (which might differ with yours).
  • AWS services are updated everyday and both the answers and questions might be outdated soon, so research accordingly.
  • AWS exam questions are not updated to keep up the pace with AWS updates, so even if the underlying feature has changed the question might not be updated
  • Open to further feedback, discussion and correction.
  1. Which of the following provides the fastest storage medium?
    1. Amazon S3
    2. Amazon EBS using Provisioned IOPS (PIOPS)
    3. SSD Instance (ephemeral) store (SSD Instance Storage provides hundreds of thousands of IOPS on some instance types, much faster than any network-attached storage)
    4. AWS Storage Gateway
  2. A company needs a block storage volume with the highest durability for a mission-critical Oracle database. Which EBS volume type should they choose?
    1. gp3
    2. gp2
    3. io2 Block Express (io2 Block Express provides 99.999% durability — 100X more durable than other volume types, designed for mission-critical applications)
    4. io1
  3. An application requires a single EBS volume with 50,000 IOPS. Which volume type(s) can meet this requirement? (Choose TWO)
    1. gp3 (gp3 now supports up to 80,000 IOPS as of Sep 2025)
    2. gp2 (gp2 max is 16,000 IOPS)
    3. io2 Block Express (io2 Block Express supports up to 256,000 IOPS)
    4. st1 (st1 is HDD-backed and optimized for throughput, not IOPS)
  4. Which statements about EBS Elastic Volumes are correct? (Choose TWO)
    1. You can increase volume size without detaching or stopping the instance
    2. You can decrease volume size dynamically (Volume size can only be increased, not decreased)
    3. Up to 4 modifications are allowed per volume within a 24-hour rolling window
    4. Volume modifications require a reboot to take effect (No downtime or reboot required)
  5. A company wants to reduce costs for EBS snapshots that are retained for compliance for 2 years but rarely accessed. What should they use?
    1. S3 Glacier Deep Archive
    2. EBS Snapshots Archive (EBS Snapshots Archive provides up to 75% lower costs for snapshots stored 90+ days that are rarely accessed)
    3. Delete the snapshots and use AMIs instead
    4. Use sc1 volumes instead of snapshots
  6. Which of the following is true about EC2 Instance Store volumes? (Choose TWO)
    1. Data is lost when the instance is stopped or terminated
    2. Instance store volumes can be detached and attached to another instance (Instance store volumes cannot be detached)
    3. Instance store volumes provide lower latency than EBS because they are physically attached
    4. Instance store volumes support point-in-time snapshots (Snapshots are not supported for instance store)
  7. A company needs to attach a single high-performance EBS volume to 8 EC2 instances in the same AZ for a clustered application. Which solution is appropriate?
    1. Use gp3 with Multi-Attach (Multi-Attach is not supported on gp3)
    2. Use io2 Block Express with Multi-Attach (io2 Block Express supports Multi-Attach to up to 16 Nitro-based instances in the same AZ with NVMe reservations for I/O fencing)
    3. Use instance store volumes shared via NFS
    4. Use st1 with Multi-Attach (Multi-Attach is not supported on HDD volumes)

References

AWS Services Overview – Whitepaper – Certification

~ Last updated on : ~ jayendrapatil ~ 9 Comments

AWS Services Overview

AWS consists of many cloud services that can be used in combinations tailored to meet business or organizational needs. This section introduces the major AWS services by category.

NOTE – This post provides a brief overview of AWS services. It is a good introduction to start all certifications. However, it is most relevant and important for the AWS Cloud Practitioner Certification Exam.

Last updated: June 2026. Reflects current AWS service names, deprecations, and new services launched through 2024-2026.

Common Features

  • Almost all features can be access-controlled through AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)
  • Services managed by AWS are all made Scalable and Highly Available, without any changes needed from the user
  • Most services support encryption at rest and in transit by default

AWS Access

AWS allows accessing its services through unified tools using

  • AWS Management Console – a simple and intuitive user interface
  • AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) – programmatic access through scripts
  • AWS Software Development Kits (SDKs) – programmatic access through Application Program Interface (API) tailored for programming languages (Java, .NET, Node.js, PHP, Python, Ruby, Go, C++, Rust, Kotlin, Swift) or platforms (Android, Browser, iOS)
  • AWS CloudShell – a browser-based shell environment pre-authenticated with console credentials
  • Infrastructure as Code (IaC) – AWS CloudFormation, AWS CDK, or Terraform for declarative resource provisioning

Security, Identity, and Compliance

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)

  • enables you to securely control access to AWS services and resources for the users.
  • allows creation of AWS users, groups and roles, and use permissions to allow and deny their access to AWS resources
  • helps manage IAM users and their access with individual security credentials like access keys, passwords, and multi-factor authentication devices, or request temporary security credentials
  • helps role creation & manage permissions to control which operations can be performed by which entity, or AWS service, that assumes the role
  • enables identity federation to allow existing identities in the enterprise to access AWS without the need to create an IAM user for each identity.
  • IAM Identity Center (formerly AWS SSO) provides centralized workforce identity management and single sign-on access to multiple AWS accounts and applications.

Amazon Inspector

  • is an automated vulnerability management service that continually scans workloads for software vulnerabilities and unintended network exposure.
  • automatically discovers and scans EC2 instances, container images in Amazon ECR, and AWS Lambda functions.
  • supports both agent-based and agentless scanning for EC2 instances.
  • produces a detailed list of security findings prioritized by a contextualized risk score that correlates CVE information with network access and exploitability factors.
  • integrates with AWS Security Hub for centralized findings management.

AWS Certificate Manager

  • helps provision, manage, and deploy Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS) certificates for use with AWS services like ELB, CloudFront, and API Gateway
  • removes the time-consuming manual process of purchasing, uploading, and renewing SSL/TLS certificates.

AWS CloudHSM

  • helps meet corporate, contractual, and regulatory compliance requirements for data security by using dedicated Hardware Security Module (HSM) appliances within the AWS Cloud.
  • allows protection of encryption keys within HSMs, designed and validated to government standards for secure key management.
  • helps comply with strict key management requirements without sacrificing application performance.

AWS Directory Service

  • provides Microsoft Active Directory (Enterprise Edition), also known as AWS Managed Microsoft AD, that enables directory-aware workloads and AWS resources to use managed Active Directory in the AWS Cloud.

AWS Key Management Service (KMS)

  • is a managed service that makes it easy to create and control the encryption keys used to encrypt your data.
  • uses HSMs to protect the security of your keys.
  • integrates with most AWS services for seamless encryption of data at rest.

AWS Organizations

  • allows creation of AWS account groups, to more easily manage security and automation settings collectively
  • helps centrally manage multiple accounts to help scale.
  • helps control which AWS services are available to individual accounts using Service Control Policies (SCPs), automate new account creation, and simplify billing.

AWS Shield

  • is a managed Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection service that safeguards web applications running on AWS.
  • provides always-on detection and automatic inline mitigations that minimize application downtime and latency.
  • provides two tiers: Shield Standard (free, automatic) and Shield Advanced (paid, enhanced protection with 24/7 DDoS Response Team access).

AWS WAF

  • is a web application firewall that helps protect web applications from common web exploits that could affect application availability, compromise security, or consume excessive resources.
  • gives complete control over which traffic to allow or block to web application by defining customizable web security rules.
  • integrates with CloudFront, Application Load Balancer, API Gateway, and AWS AppSync.

Amazon GuardDuty

  • is a threat detection service that continuously monitors AWS accounts, workloads, and data for malicious activity and anomalous behavior.
  • analyzes events from AWS CloudTrail, VPC Flow Logs, DNS logs, and other sources using machine learning and threat intelligence.
  • provides actionable security findings with severity levels for prioritized response.

Amazon Macie

  • is a data security service that discovers sensitive data using machine learning and pattern matching.
  • automatically discovers and protects sensitive data stored in Amazon S3, such as personally identifiable information (PII) and financial data.
  • provides visibility into data security risks and enables automated protection.

AWS Security Hub

  • provides a comprehensive view of your security posture across AWS accounts.
  • aggregates, organizes, and prioritizes security findings from multiple AWS services (GuardDuty, Inspector, Macie) and AWS Partner solutions.
  • automates security checks against best practices and industry standards.

Amazon Security Lake

  • automatically centralizes security data from AWS environments, SaaS providers, and on-premises sources into a purpose-built data lake.
  • normalizes data using the Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF) for easier analysis.
  • stores data in your account using S3, giving you full control and ownership.

AWS Compute Services

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

  • provides secure, resizable compute capacity
  • provides complete control of the computing resources (root access, ability to start, stop, terminate instances etc.)
  • reduces the time required to obtain and boot new instances to minutes
  • allows quick scaling of capacity, both up and down, as computing requirements change
  • provides developers and sysadmins tools to build failure-resilient applications and isolate themselves from common failure scenarios.
  • Benefits
    • Elastic Web-Scale Computing – enables scaling to increase or decrease capacity within minutes.
    • Flexible Cloud Hosting Services – flexibility to choose from multiple instance types (including AWS Graviton-based ARM instances for better price-performance), operating systems, and software packages.
    • Reliable – offers a highly reliable environment where replacement instances can be rapidly commissioned. EC2 SLA commitment is 99.99% availability for each Region.
    • Secure – works in conjunction with VPC to provide security and robust networking functionality. Allows control of IP address, exposure to Internet (using subnets), inbound and outbound access (using Security groups and NACLs).
    • Inexpensive – pay only for the capacity actually used
  • EC2 Purchasing Options
    • On-Demand Instances – pay for compute capacity by the hour or second with no long-term commitments.
    • Savings Plans – flexible pricing model offering up to 72% savings in exchange for a commitment to a consistent amount of usage (measured in $/hour) for a 1 or 3-year term. Available as Compute Savings Plans or EC2 Instance Savings Plans.
    • Reserved Instances – provides significant discount (up to 72%) compared to On-Demand pricing for a 1 or 3-year commitment to a specific instance type.
    • Spot Instances – allows use of spare EC2 computing capacity at up to 90% discount compared to On-Demand pricing. Instances can be interrupted by AWS with a 2-minute warning.
    • Dedicated Instances – run on hardware dedicated to a single customer for additional isolation.
    • Dedicated Hosts – physical servers with EC2 instance capacity fully dedicated to your use, allowing use of existing server-bound software licenses.

Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS)

  • is a fully managed container orchestration service that supports Docker containers.
  • allows running applications on a managed cluster of EC2 instances or serverlessly with AWS Fargate.
  • eliminates the need to install, operate, and scale cluster management infrastructure.
  • can schedule the placement of containers across the cluster based on resource needs and availability requirements.
  • integrates with Elastic Load Balancing, VPC, IAM, CloudWatch, and other AWS services.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)

  • is a managed Kubernetes service that makes it easy to run Kubernetes on AWS without needing to install and operate your own Kubernetes control plane.
  • runs upstream Kubernetes, ensuring compatibility with existing Kubernetes applications and tools.
  • automatically manages the availability and scalability of the Kubernetes control plane nodes.
  • supports running pods on EC2 instances, AWS Fargate (serverless), or on-premises with EKS Anywhere.
  • EKS Auto Mode automatically provisions and manages compute, networking, and storage for Kubernetes clusters.

Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR)

  • is a fully managed Docker container registry that makes it easy to store, manage, and deploy Docker container images.
  • is integrated with Amazon ECS and EKS, simplifying development to production workflow.
  • eliminates the need to operate container repositories or worry about scaling the underlying infrastructure.
  • supports OCI images and artifacts, private and public repositories.

AWS Fargate

  • is a serverless compute engine for containers that works with both Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS.
  • removes the need to provision, configure, or scale clusters of virtual machines to run containers.
  • allocates the right amount of compute resources, eliminating the need to choose instance types or manage scaling.
  • each task or pod runs in its own isolated environment for workload isolation by design.

Amazon Lightsail

  • is designed to be the easiest way to launch and manage a virtual private server with AWS.
  • plans include everything needed to jumpstart a project – a virtual machine, SSD-based storage, data transfer, DNS management, and a static IP address – for a low, predictable price.

AWS Batch

  • enables developers, scientists, and engineers to easily and efficiently run hundreds of thousands of batch computing jobs on AWS.
  • dynamically provisions the optimal quantity and type of compute resources based on the volume and specific resource requirements of the batch jobs submitted.
  • plans, schedules, and executes the batch computing workloads across the full range of AWS compute services and features.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk

  • is an easy-to-use service for deploying and scaling web applications and services developed with Java, .NET, PHP, Node.js, Python, Ruby, Go, and Docker on familiar servers such as Apache, Nginx, Passenger, and IIS.
  • automatically handles the deployment, from capacity provisioning, load balancing, and auto scaling to application health monitoring.
  • provides full control over the AWS resources with access to the underlying resources at any time.

AWS Lambda

  • enables running code without provisioning or managing servers, with automatic scaling for high availability.
  • pay only for the compute time consumed – there is no charge when the code is not running.
  • can be triggered from other AWS services or called directly from any web or mobile app.
  • supports container images up to 10 GB, up to 10 GB of memory, and execution durations up to 15 minutes.
  • supports multiple runtimes including Node.js, Python, Java, .NET, Go, Ruby, and custom runtimes.

AWS App Runner

  • is a fully managed service for building, deploying, and running containerized web applications and APIs at scale.
  • automatically builds and deploys from source code or container images with no infrastructure management required.
  • handles load balancing, scaling, and TLS certificate management automatically.

Auto Scaling

  • helps maintain application availability
  • allows scaling EC2 capacity up or down automatically according to defined conditions or demand spikes to reduce cost
  • helps ensure desired number of EC2 instances are running always
  • AWS Auto Scaling provides unified scaling for multiple resources (EC2, ECS, DynamoDB, Aurora) through scaling plans.
  • supports target tracking, step scaling, and predictive scaling policies.

Storage

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)

  • is object storage with a simple web service interface to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere on the web.
  • S3 Features
    • Durable – designed for durability of 99.999999999% (11 nines) of objects. Data is redundantly stored across multiple facilities and multiple devices in each facility.
    • Available – designed for up to 99.99% availability (Standard) of objects over a given year.
    • Scalable – can store virtually unlimited data
    • Secure – supports data in transit over SSL and data at rest encryption. Bucket policies, ACLs, and IAM can manage object permissions. S3 Block Public Access provides account-level settings to prevent unintended public access.
    • Storage Classes – multiple classes for different use cases:
      • S3 Standard – frequently accessed data
      • S3 Intelligent-Tiering – automatically moves data between access tiers based on usage patterns
      • S3 Standard-IA – infrequently accessed data
      • S3 One Zone-IA – infrequently accessed, single-AZ
      • S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval – archive with millisecond retrieval
      • S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval (formerly Glacier) – archive with minutes to hours retrieval
      • S3 Glacier Deep Archive – lowest-cost archive with 12-48 hour retrieval
    • Lifecycle Policies – automatically transition data between storage classes

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)

  • provides persistent block storage volumes for use with EC2 instances
  • offers the consistent and low-latency performance needed to run workloads.
  • allows scaling up or down within minutes
  • EBS Features
    • High Performance Volumes – Choose between SSD-backed (gp3, io2 Block Express) or HDD-backed (st1, sc1) volumes for performance needs.
    • Availability – designed for 99.999% availability, automatically replicates within its Availability Zone.
    • Encryption – provides seamless support for data-at-rest and data-in-transit between EC2 instances and EBS volumes.
    • Snapshots – create point-in-time snapshots backed up to S3 for long-term durability. Supports EBS Snapshots Archive for low-cost long-term retention.

Amazon Elastic File System (EFS)

  • provides simple, scalable, elastic file storage for use with AWS compute services and on-premises resources.
  • storage capacity is elastic, growing and shrinking automatically as files are added and removed.
  • works in shared mode, where multiple compute instances can access an EFS file system at the same time (NFS protocol).
  • can be mounted on on-premises servers via AWS Direct Connect or VPN.
  • is designed for high availability and durability across multiple AZs.
  • offers Standard and One Zone storage classes, each with Infrequent Access tiers.

Amazon FSx

  • provides fully managed third-party file systems with native compatibility for various workloads.
  • FSx for Windows File Server – fully managed Windows native file system with SMB protocol support, Active Directory integration.
  • FSx for Lustre – high-performance file system for compute-intensive workloads (ML, HPC, media processing).
  • FSx for NetApp ONTAP – fully managed NetApp ONTAP file system with multi-protocol access.
  • FSx for OpenZFS – fully managed OpenZFS file system for Linux workloads.

AWS Storage Gateway

  • seamlessly enables hybrid storage between on-premises storage environments and the AWS Cloud
  • combines a multi-protocol storage appliance with highly efficient network connectivity to AWS cloud storage services.
  • provides three gateway types: S3 File Gateway, FSx File Gateway, Volume Gateway, and Tape Gateway.

AWS Backup

  • is a fully managed backup service that centralizes and automates the backup of data across AWS services.
  • supports EC2, EBS, RDS, DynamoDB, EFS, FSx, Storage Gateway, and more.
  • provides a central backup console, backup policies, and cross-Region/cross-account backup capabilities.

Databases

Amazon Aurora

  • is a MySQL and PostgreSQL compatible relational database engine
  • provides the speed and availability of high-end commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases.
  • Benefits
    • Highly Secure – provides network isolation using VPC, encryption at rest using KMS, and encryption of data in transit using SSL.
    • Highly Scalable – automatically grows storage as needed, up to 128 TB.
    • High Availability and Durability – designed for greater than 99.99% availability. Six copies of data replicated across three AZs. Instance failover typically requires less than 30 seconds.
    • Fully Managed – database management tasks like provisioning, patching, backup, recovery, and failover are automated.
    • Aurora Serverless v2 – automatically scales capacity up and down based on application demand, ideal for variable or unpredictable workloads.

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)

  • makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database
  • provides cost-efficient and resizable capacity while managing time-consuming database administration tasks
  • supports Amazon Aurora, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server
  • Benefits
    • Fast and Easy to Administer – no need for infrastructure provisioning or database software installation and maintenance.
    • Highly Scalable – allows quick scaling of compute and storage resources. Read Replicas available to offload read traffic.
    • Available and Durable – Multi-AZ deployments synchronously replicate data to a standby instance in a different AZ. Automated backups, snapshots, and automatic host replacement.
    • Secure – network isolation using VPC, encryption at rest with KMS, encryption in transit with SSL.
    • Inexpensive – pay low rates with On-Demand or Reserved Instance pricing.
    • RDS Proxy – a fully managed database proxy that makes applications more scalable and resilient to database failures.

Amazon DynamoDB

  • is a fully managed, serverless, key-value and document NoSQL database designed for single-digit millisecond performance at any scale.
  • supports both document and key-value data models.
  • Benefits
    • Fast, Consistent Performance – designed to deliver consistent, fast performance at any scale using SSD storage and automatic partitioning.
    • Highly Scalable – manages all scaling to achieve specified throughput capacity. Supports on-demand and provisioned capacity modes.
    • Event-Driven Programming – DynamoDB Streams and integration with Lambda enable applications that automatically react to data changes.
    • Global Tables – provides fully managed multi-Region, multi-active replication for globally distributed applications.
    • DAX (DynamoDB Accelerator) – in-memory caching for DynamoDB delivering microsecond read latency.

Amazon ElastiCache

  • is a web service that makes it easy to deploy, operate, and scale an in-memory cache in the cloud.
  • helps improve the performance of web applications by allowing retrieval from fast, managed, in-memory caches instead of slower disk-based databases.
  • supports two open-source in-memory caching engines: Redis (now Valkey-compatible) and Memcached.

Amazon MemoryDB

  • is a durable, Redis/Valkey-compatible, in-memory database service for ultra-fast performance.
  • delivers microsecond reads and single-digit millisecond writes with Multi-AZ durability.
  • can be used as a primary database for applications requiring both high performance and data durability.

Amazon DocumentDB

  • is a fully managed document database service that supports MongoDB workloads.
  • designed for JSON data management at scale with automatic scaling storage.

Amazon Neptune

  • is a fully managed graph database service for building applications that work with highly connected datasets.
  • supports Property Graph and RDF models with Apache TinkerPop Gremlin and SPARQL query languages.

Amazon Keyspaces

  • is a scalable, highly available, and fully managed Apache Cassandra-compatible database service.
  • serverless – pay only for the resources you use and the table automatically scales up and down.

Migration

AWS Application Discovery Service

  • helps plan application migration projects by automatically identifying applications running in on-premises data centers, their associated dependencies, and performance profiles.
  • automatically collects configuration and usage data from servers, storage, and networking equipment.
  • information is retained in encrypted format and can be exported for use with visualization tools or cloud migration solutions.

AWS Database Migration Service (DMS)

  • helps migrate databases to AWS easily and securely
  • source database remains fully operational during the migration, minimizing downtime.
  • supports homogeneous migrations (e.g., Oracle to Oracle) and heterogeneous migrations (e.g., Oracle to Aurora, SQL Server to MySQL).
  • allows streaming data to Redshift, S3, and other targets from supported sources.
  • can also be used for continuous data replication with high availability.
  • AWS Schema Conversion Tool (SCT) helps convert database schemas between different database engines.

AWS Application Migration Service (AWS MGN / AWS Transform MGN)

  • is the recommended service for lift-and-shift (rehost) migrations to AWS, replacing the deprecated AWS Server Migration Service.
  • automates the conversion of source servers (physical, virtual, or cloud) into native Amazon EC2 instances.
  • provides continuous block-level replication, short cutover windows, and automated testing.
  • Note: Previously called AWS Application Migration Service (MGN), now rebranded as AWS Transform MGN (June 2026).

AWS Snow Family

⚠️ Note: The AWS Snow Family is being wound down. As of November 2025, Snowball Edge devices are only available to existing customers. New customers should use AWS DataSync, AWS Data Transfer Terminal, or AWS Partner solutions.

  • AWS Snowball Edge (existing customers only) – a data transfer and edge computing device with on-board storage and compute capabilities. Can move large amounts of data and support local workloads.
  • AWS Snowmobile – Retired (March 2024). No longer available.
  • Migration Alternatives:
    • AWS DataSync – online data transfer service for automated transfer between on-premises and AWS storage.
    • AWS Data Transfer Terminal – secure physical location for transferring data to AWS.
    • AWS Transfer Family – fully managed SFTP, FTPS, FTP, and AS2 service for file transfers to S3 or EFS.

Networking and Content Delivery

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)

  • helps provision a logically isolated section of the AWS Cloud where AWS resources can be launched in a virtual network that you define.
  • provides complete control over the virtual networking environment, including selection of IP address range, creation of subnets (public and private), and configuration of route tables and network gateways.
  • allows use of both IPv4 and IPv6 for secure and easy access to resources.
  • allows multiple layers of security, including security groups and network access control lists (NACLs).
  • allows creation of VPN connections between corporate data center and VPC.
  • VPC Peering enables private connectivity between VPCs. Transit Gateway provides a hub for connecting multiple VPCs and on-premises networks.

Amazon CloudFront

  • is a global content delivery network (CDN) service that accelerates delivery of websites, APIs, video content, or other web assets.
  • can deliver entire website, including dynamic, static, streaming, and interactive content using a global network of edge locations.
  • requests for content are automatically routed to the nearest edge location for best possible performance.
  • is optimized to work with S3, EC2, ELB, Route 53, and API Gateway as well as non-AWS origin servers.
  • supports edge functions via CloudFront Functions and Lambda@Edge for customizing content at the edge.

Amazon Route 53

  • is a highly available and scalable Domain Name System (DNS) web service.
  • connects user requests to infrastructure running in AWS or outside of AWS.
  • helps configure DNS health checks to route traffic to healthy endpoints.
  • allows traffic management globally through latency-based routing, Geo DNS, geoproximity, weighted round robin, multivalue answer, and IP-based routing – all combinable with DNS Failover.
  • is fully compliant with IPv6 and offers Domain Name Registration service.

AWS Direct Connect

  • makes it easy to establish a dedicated network connection from on-premises to AWS.
  • helps establish private connectivity between AWS and data center, office, or co-location environment.
  • helps increase bandwidth throughput, reduce network costs, and provide a more consistent network experience than Internet-based connections.

Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)

  • automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets (EC2 instances, containers, IP addresses, Lambda functions).
  • enables greater levels of fault tolerance by seamlessly providing the required amount of load balancing capacity.
  • offers four types of load balancers:
    • Application Load Balancer (ALB) – operates at Layer 7 (HTTP/HTTPS). Routes traffic based on content of the request. Ideal for microservices, container-based architectures, and advanced routing needs.
    • Network Load Balancer (NLB) – operates at Layer 4 (TCP/UDP/TLS). Handles millions of requests per second with ultra-low latency. Ideal for TCP/UDP traffic and extreme performance requirements.
    • Gateway Load Balancer (GWLB) – operates at Layer 3 (IP). Makes it easy to deploy, scale, and manage third-party virtual appliances (firewalls, IDS/IPS). Combines transparent network gateway with load balancing.
    • Classic Load Balancer (CLB) – previous generation, operates at both Layer 4 and Layer 7. Recommended to migrate to ALB or NLB.

AWS Global Accelerator

  • is a networking service that improves the availability and performance of applications by using the AWS global network.
  • provides two static anycast IP addresses that serve as a fixed entry point to applications hosted in one or more AWS Regions.
  • continuously monitors endpoints and instantly routes traffic to the closest healthy endpoint.

AWS PrivateLink

  • provides private connectivity between VPCs, AWS services, and on-premises applications without exposing traffic to the public internet.
  • simplifies security of data shared between cloud-based applications and on-premises services.

Management and Governance

Amazon CloudWatch

  • is a monitoring and observability service for AWS Cloud resources and the applications running on AWS.
  • can collect and track metrics, collect and monitor log files, set alarms, and automatically react to changes in AWS resources.
  • provides CloudWatch Logs, Metrics, Alarms, Dashboards, and Events (now EventBridge) for comprehensive monitoring.
  • supports custom metrics, anomaly detection, and cross-account observability.

AWS CloudFormation

  • allows developers and systems administrators to implement “Infrastructure as Code”
  • provides an easy way to create and manage a collection of related AWS resources, provisioning and updating them in an orderly and predictable fashion.
  • handles the order for provisioning AWS services and the subtleties of making those dependencies work.
  • allows applying version control to AWS infrastructure the same way it’s done with software.
  • AWS CDK (Cloud Development Kit) allows defining infrastructure using familiar programming languages (TypeScript, Python, Java, etc.) that synthesize to CloudFormation templates.

AWS CloudTrail

  • records AWS API calls for the account and delivers log files.
  • includes API calls made via the Console, CLI, SDKs, and higher-level AWS services.
  • recorded information includes the identity of the API caller, time, source IP address, request parameters, and response elements.
  • enables security analysis, resource change tracking, compliance auditing, and operational troubleshooting.
  • supports CloudTrail Lake for SQL-based querying and long-term retention of events.

AWS Config

  • provides an AWS resource inventory, configuration history, and configuration change notifications to enable security and governance.
  • provides Config Rules feature that enables creation of rules to automatically check the configuration of AWS resources.
  • helps discover existing and deleted AWS resources, determine overall compliance against rules, and dive into configuration details at any point in time.
  • supports Conformance Packs for packaging multiple Config Rules and remediation actions together.

AWS Systems Manager

  • provides a unified user interface to view operational data from multiple AWS services and automate operational tasks across AWS resources.
  • includes capabilities for patch management, configuration management, session management, parameter store, and run command.
  • helps maintain security and compliance by scanning managed instances for patch compliance and configuration inconsistencies.

AWS Service Catalog

  • allows organizations to create and manage catalogs of IT services approved for use on AWS.
  • helps centrally manage commonly deployed IT services and helps achieve consistent governance and compliance requirements.

AWS Trusted Advisor

  • is an online resource that inspects your AWS environment and provides recommendations across five categories: cost optimization, performance, security, fault tolerance, and service limits.
  • provides real-time guidance to help provision resources following AWS best practices.

AWS Health Dashboard

  • provides alerts and remediation guidance when AWS is experiencing events that might affect you (formerly Personal Health Dashboard).
  • displays relevant information to help manage events in progress and provides proactive notification for scheduled activities.
  • provides a personalized view into the performance and availability of AWS services underlying your resources.

AWS Control Tower

  • provides the easiest way to set up and govern a secure, multi-account AWS environment (landing zone).
  • establishes a well-architected multi-account baseline with guardrails (preventive and detective) for governance.
  • automates account provisioning and applies best practices for identity management, federated access, and logging.

Developer Tools

AWS CodeCommit

  • is a fully managed source control service that hosts secure and highly scalable private Git repositories.
  • ⚠️ Note: CodeCommit is no longer available to new customers (July 2024). Existing customers can continue using it. Consider GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket as alternatives.

AWS CodeBuild

  • is a fully managed build service that compiles source code, runs tests, and produces software packages that are ready to deploy.
  • scales continuously and processes multiple builds concurrently.

AWS CodeDeploy

  • is a service that automates code deployments to any instance, including EC2 instances, Lambda functions, ECS services, and on-premises servers.
  • helps rapidly release new features, avoid downtime during deployment, and handles the complexity of updating applications.

AWS CodePipeline

  • is a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) service for fast and reliable application and infrastructure updates.
  • builds, tests, and deploys code every time there is a code change, based on defined release process models.

AWS X-Ray

  • helps developers analyze and debug distributed applications in production, such as those built using microservices architectures.
  • provides an end-to-end view of requests as they travel through the application, and shows a map of its underlying components.
  • helps identify and troubleshoot the root cause of performance issues and errors.

Amazon Q Developer

  • is a generative AI-powered assistant for software development (formerly Amazon CodeWhisperer).
  • provides AI-powered code suggestions, security scanning, code transformation, and natural language chat for development tasks.
  • supports multiple IDEs and programming languages.

Messaging and Application Integration

Amazon SQS

  • is a fast, reliable, scalable, fully managed message queuing service.
  • makes it simple and cost-effective to decouple the components of a cloud application.
  • includes Standard queues with high throughput and at-least-once processing, and FIFO queues with exactly-once processing and ordered delivery.

Amazon SNS

  • is a fast, flexible, fully managed pub/sub messaging and mobile notification service.
  • can send notifications to Apple, Google, Windows, and other mobile platforms, email, SMS, HTTP endpoints, SQS queues, and Lambda functions.
  • supports message filtering, FIFO topics, and message archiving.

Amazon SES

  • is a cost-effective, scalable email service for sending transactional email, marketing messages, or any other type of high-quality content.
  • can also receive messages and deliver them to S3, trigger Lambda functions, or publish to SNS.

Amazon EventBridge

  • is a serverless event bus that makes it easy to connect applications using data from your own apps, SaaS apps, and AWS services.
  • delivers a stream of real-time data from event sources and routes that data to targets like Lambda, Step Functions, SQS, and more.
  • replaces CloudWatch Events with additional capabilities including schema registry and third-party integrations.

AWS Step Functions

  • makes it easy to coordinate the components of distributed applications and microservices using visual workflows.
  • automatically triggers and tracks each step, and retries when there are errors.
  • supports Standard Workflows (long-running) and Express Workflows (high-volume, short-duration).

Amazon API Gateway

  • is a fully managed service for creating, publishing, maintaining, monitoring, and securing APIs at any scale.
  • handles traffic management, authorization, access control, monitoring, and API version management.
  • supports REST APIs, HTTP APIs, and WebSocket APIs.

Analytics

Amazon Athena

  • is an interactive query service that helps analyze data in S3 using standard SQL.
  • is serverless – no infrastructure to manage, pay only for queries run.
  • supports querying data in multiple formats including CSV, JSON, ORC, Avro, and Parquet.
  • integrates with AWS Glue Data Catalog for schema management.

Amazon EMR

  • provides a managed big data platform that makes it easy, fast, and cost-effective to process vast amounts of data.
  • supports Apache Spark, Hive, HBase, Presto, Flink, and other popular frameworks.
  • can run on EC2, EKS, or serverlessly with EMR Serverless.
  • handles big data use cases including log analysis, ETL, machine learning, and scientific simulation.

Amazon OpenSearch Service

  • makes it easy to deploy, operate, and scale OpenSearch (and legacy Elasticsearch) for log analytics, full-text search, application monitoring, and more.
  • Note: Renamed from Amazon Elasticsearch Service in September 2021.
  • is a fully managed service delivering real-time search and analytics capabilities along with availability, scalability, and security for production workloads.
  • supports OpenSearch Dashboards (successor to Kibana) for data visualization.

Amazon Kinesis

  • is a platform for streaming data on AWS, offering services to collect, process, and analyze real-time streaming data.
  • offers:
    • Amazon Kinesis Data Streams – enables building custom applications that process or analyze streaming data for specialized needs.
    • Amazon Data Firehose (formerly Kinesis Data Firehose) – easiest way to capture, transform, and load streaming data into S3, Redshift, OpenSearch, and third-party services like Splunk and Snowflake.
    • Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink (formerly Kinesis Data Analytics) – process and analyze streaming data in real time using Apache Flink.
    • Amazon Kinesis Video Streams – capture, process, and store video streams for analytics and machine learning.

Amazon Redshift

  • provides a fast, fully managed, petabyte-scale cloud data warehouse.
  • uses massively parallel processing (MPP) architecture, parallelizing and distributing SQL operations across nodes.
  • supports Redshift Serverless for running analytics without managing infrastructure.
  • provides Redshift Spectrum to query data directly in S3 without loading it.

Amazon QuickSight

  • is a fast, cloud-powered business intelligence (BI) service for building visualizations, performing ad-hoc analysis, and getting business insights from data.
  • supports ML-powered insights with Amazon Q in QuickSight for natural language querying.

AWS Glue

  • is a serverless data integration service that makes it easy to discover, prepare, move, and integrate data from multiple sources.
  • provides the Glue Data Catalog as a central metadata repository.
  • simplifies and automates data discovery, ETL job authoring, and job scheduling.
  • scales automatically and provisions resources as needed.

AWS Lake Formation

  • makes it easy to set up a secure data lake in days instead of months.
  • provides centralized governance and security for data lake access using fine-grained permissions.

Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence

Amazon Bedrock

  • is a fully managed service offering access to leading foundation models (FMs) from AI companies (Anthropic, Meta, Mistral, Amazon, and others) through a single API.
  • provides capabilities to build generative AI applications with security, privacy, and responsible AI features.
  • supports use cases like text generation, summarization, image generation, chatbots, and AI agents.
  • offers Bedrock Agents for building autonomous AI agents and Bedrock Knowledge Bases for RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation).

Amazon SageMaker

  • is a fully managed machine learning service to build, train, and deploy ML models at scale.
  • provides SageMaker Studio as a unified IDE for ML development.
  • supports the entire ML workflow: data preparation, model building, training, tuning, and deployment.
  • includes built-in algorithms, pre-built ML frameworks, and AutoML capabilities.

Amazon Rekognition

  • makes it easy to add image and video analysis to applications using deep learning technology.
  • can identify objects, people, text, scenes, and activities, and detect inappropriate content.

Amazon Comprehend

  • is a natural language processing (NLP) service that uses machine learning to find insights and relationships in text.
  • can identify the language, extract key phrases, sentiment, entities, and topics.

Amazon Lex

  • is a service for building conversational interfaces using voice and text (same technology that powers Alexa).
  • provides automatic speech recognition (ASR) and natural language understanding (NLU).

Amazon Polly

  • is a text-to-speech service that turns text into lifelike speech using deep learning.
  • supports multiple languages and provides a variety of natural-sounding voices.

Amazon Transcribe

  • is an automatic speech recognition (ASR) service that converts speech to text.
  • supports real-time transcription and batch transcription of audio files.

Amazon Translate

  • is a neural machine translation service for fast, high-quality language translation.
  • supports translation between supported languages for applications and content.

Cloud Financial Management

AWS Cost Explorer

  • provides an easy-to-use interface to visualize, understand, and manage AWS costs and usage over time.
  • offers forecasting, savings recommendations, and detailed filtering/grouping of cost data.

AWS Budgets

  • allows setting custom budgets that alert when costs or usage exceed (or are forecasted to exceed) the budgeted amount.
  • supports cost, usage, reservation, and savings plans budgets.

AWS Pricing Calculator

  • helps estimate the cost of using AWS services before deployment.
  • allows creating cost estimates for various architectures and configurations.

Deprecated Services (Historical Reference)

The following services mentioned in the original AWS Overview Whitepaper have been deprecated or discontinued. They are listed here for reference and certification context.

  • Amazon Cloud Directory – No longer open to new customers (November 2025). Alternatives: DynamoDB, Neptune.
  • AWS OpsWorks – Reached End of Life on May 26, 2024. Disabled for all customers. Alternatives: AWS Systems Manager, CloudFormation, CodeDeploy.
  • Amazon Elastic Transcoder – Discontinued November 13, 2025. Replaced by AWS Elemental MediaConvert.
  • AWS Server Migration Service (SMS) – Deprecated. Replaced by AWS Application Migration Service (MGN / Transform MGN).
  • AWS Data Pipeline – No longer available to new customers (July 2024). Alternatives: AWS Glue, Step Functions, Amazon MWAA (Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow).
  • Amazon SWF (Simple Workflow Service) – Still operational but superseded by AWS Step Functions for new workloads.
  • AWS Snowmobile – Retired March 2024. No longer available.
  • Amazon CodeCatalyst – No longer open to new customers (November 2025).

AWS Certification Exam Practice Questions

  • Questions are collected from Internet and the answers are marked as per my knowledge and understanding (which might differ with yours).
  • AWS services are updated everyday and both the answers and questions might be outdated soon, so research accordingly.
  • AWS exam questions are not updated to keep up the pace with AWS updates, so even if the underlying feature has changed the question might not be updated
  • Open to further feedback, discussion and correction.
  1. Which AWS services belong to the Compute services? Choose 2 answers
    1. Lambda
    2. EC2
    3. S3
    4. EMR
    5. CloudFront
  2. Which AWS service provides low cost storage option for archival and long-term backup?
    1. S3 Glacier
    2. S3 Standard
    3. EBS
    4. CloudFront
  3. Which AWS services belong to the Storage services? Choose 2 answers
    1. EFS
    2. IAM
    3. EMR
    4. S3
    5. CloudFront
  4. A Company allows users to upload videos on its platform. They want to convert the videos to multiple formats supported on multiple devices and platforms. Which AWS service can they leverage for the requirement?
    1. AWS SWF
    2. AWS Video Converter
    3. AWS Elemental MediaConvert
    4. AWS Data Pipeline
  5. Which analytic service helps analyze data in S3 using standard SQL?
    1. Athena
    2. EMR
    3. OpenSearch
    4. Kinesis
  6. What features does AWS’s Route 53 service provide? Choose the 2 correct answers:
    1. Content Caching
    2. Domain Name System (DNS) service
    3. Database Management
    4. Domain Registration
  7. You are trying to organize and import (to AWS) gigabytes of data that are currently structured in JSON-like, name-value documents. What AWS service would best fit your needs?
    1. Lambda
    2. DynamoDB
    3. RDS
    4. Aurora
  8. What AWS database is primarily used to analyze data using standard SQL formatting with compatibility for your existing business intelligence tools? Choose the correct answer:
    1. Redshift
    2. RDS
    3. DynamoDB
    4. ElastiCache
  9. A company wants their application to use pre-configured machine image with software installed and configured. Which AWS feature can help for the same?
    1. Amazon Machine Image (AMI)
    2. AWS CloudFormation
    3. AWS Lambda
    4. AWS Lightsail
  10. What AWS service can be used to track API event calls for security analysis and resource change tracking?
    1. AWS CloudWatch
    2. AWS CloudFormation
    3. AWS CloudTrail
    4. AWS Systems Manager
  11. Which AWS service can help offload the read traffic from your database in order to reduce latency caused by read-heavy workload?
    1. ElastiCache
    2. DynamoDB
    3. S3
    4. EFS
  12. What service allows system administrators to run “Infrastructure as Code”?
    1. CloudFormation
    2. CloudWatch
    3. CloudTrail
    4. CodeDeploy
  13. Which AWS service is a fully managed container orchestration service?
    1. EC2
    2. Amazon ECS
    3. AWS Lambda
    4. Amazon S3
  14. A company wants to run containers without managing servers or clusters. Which AWS service should they use?
    1. Amazon EC2
    2. Amazon EKS on EC2
    3. AWS Fargate
    4. AWS Batch
  15. Which AWS service provides a fully managed generative AI service with access to foundation models?
    1. Amazon SageMaker
    2. Amazon Bedrock
    3. Amazon Comprehend
    4. Amazon Rekognition
  16. Which Elastic Load Balancer type operates at Layer 4 and is best suited for ultra-low latency TCP/UDP traffic?
    1. Application Load Balancer
    2. Network Load Balancer
    3. Gateway Load Balancer
    4. Classic Load Balancer
  17. Which AWS service provides centralized threat detection by continuously monitoring AWS accounts and workloads for malicious activity?
    1. AWS WAF
    2. Amazon Inspector
    3. Amazon GuardDuty
    4. AWS Shield
  18. A company wants to save costs on EC2 by committing to a consistent usage amount ($/hour) for 1-3 years with flexibility across instance families, regions, and services. What should they use?
    1. Reserved Instances
    2. Spot Instances
    3. Compute Savings Plans
    4. Dedicated Hosts

References

Architecting for the Cloud – AWS Best Practices – Whitepaper – Certification

~ Last updated on : ~ jayendrapatil ~ 5 Comments

Architecting for the Cloud – AWS Best Practices

📋 Important Note: Whitepaper Superseded

The original “Architecting for the Cloud: AWS Best Practices” whitepaper (last updated October 2018) has been superseded by the AWS Well-Architected Framework.

The Well-Architected Framework is now organized into six pillars: Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, Cost Optimization, and Sustainability (added in 2021). It receives continuous updates — most recently in November 2024 and April 2025.

This post is maintained for certification study purposes as the core architectural principles remain relevant.

Architecting for the Cloud – AWS Best Practices whitepaper provides architectural patterns and advice on how to design systems that are secure, reliable, high performing, and cost efficient

AWS Design Principles

Scalability

  • While AWS provides virtually unlimited on-demand capacity, the architecture should be designed to take advantage of those resources
  • There are two ways to scale an IT architecture
    • Vertical Scaling
      • takes place through increasing specifications of an individual resource for e.g. updating EC2 instance type with increasing RAM, CPU, IOPS, or networking capabilities
      • will eventually hit a limit, and is not always a cost effective or highly available approach
      • AWS Graviton-based instances (Graviton4 as of 2024) offer up to 40% better price-performance, making vertical scaling more cost-effective
    • Horizontal Scaling
      • takes place through increasing number of resources for e.g. adding more EC2 instances or EBS volumes
      • can help leverage the elasticity of cloud computing
      • not all the architectures can be designed to distribute their workload to multiple resources
      • applications designed should be stateless,
        • that needs no knowledge of previous interactions and stores no session information
        • capacity can be increased and decreased, after running tasks have been drained
      • State, if needed, can be implemented using
        • Low latency external store, for e.g. DynamoDB, ElastiCache (Redis or Memcached), to maintain state information
        • Session affinity, for e.g. ELB sticky sessions, to bind all the transactions of a session to a specific compute resource. However, it cannot be guaranteed or take advantage of newly added resources for existing sessions
      • Load can be distributed across multiple resources using
        • Push model, for e.g. through ELB where it distributes the load across multiple EC2 instances
        • Pull model, for e.g. through SQS or Kinesis where multiple consumers subscribe and consume
      • Distributed processing, for e.g. using EMR or Kinesis, helps process large amounts of data by dividing task and its data into many small fragments of works

Disposable Resources Instead of Fixed Servers

  • Resources need to be treated as temporary disposable resources rather than fixed permanent on-premises resources before
  • AWS focuses on the concept of Immutable infrastructure
    • servers once launched, is never updated throughout its lifetime.
    • updates can be performed on a new server with latest configurations,
    • this ensures resources are always in a consistent (and tested) state and easier rollbacks
  • AWS provides multiple ways to instantiate compute resources in an automated and repeatable way
    • Bootstrapping
      • scripts to configure and setup for e.g. using EC2 user data scripts and cloud-init to install software or copy resources and code
    • Golden Images
      • a snapshot of a particular state of that resource,
      • faster start times and removes dependencies to configuration services or third-party repositories
      • EC2 Image Builder can automate creation, testing, and distribution of golden AMIs
    • Containers
      • AWS supports container workloads through Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS, and AWS Fargate (serverless containers)
      • Docker allows packaging a piece of software in a Docker Image, which is a standardized unit for software development, containing everything the software needs to run: code, runtime, system tools, system libraries, etc
      • AWS Fargate provides serverless compute for containers, eliminating the need to manage underlying EC2 instances
  • Infrastructure as Code
    • AWS assets are programmable, techniques, practices, and tools from software development can be applied to make the whole infrastructure reusable, maintainable, extensible, and testable.
    • AWS provides services for IaC deployment:
      • AWS CloudFormation – declarative JSON/YAML templates for provisioning AWS resources
      • AWS CDK (Cloud Development Kit) – define infrastructure using familiar programming languages (TypeScript, Python, Java, Go, C#) that synthesize to CloudFormation
      • AWS SAM (Serverless Application Model) – simplified CloudFormation for serverless applications
    • Note: AWS OpsWorks reached End of Life on May 26, 2024 and is no longer available. Use AWS Systems Manager, CloudFormation, or CDK as alternatives.

Automation

  • AWS provides various automation tools and services which help improve system’s stability, efficiency and time to market.
    • Elastic Beanstalk
      • a PaaS that allows quick application deployment while handling resource provisioning, load balancing, auto scaling, monitoring etc
    • EC2 Auto Recovery
      • creates CloudWatch alarm that monitors an EC2 instance and automatically recovers it if it becomes impaired.
      • A recovered instance is identical to the original instance, including the instance ID, private & Elastic IP addresses, and all instance metadata.
      • Instance is migrated through reboot, in memory contents are lost.
    • Auto Scaling
      • allows maintain application availability and scale the capacity up or down automatically as per defined conditions
      • supports predictive scaling that uses machine learning to forecast traffic and proactively scale capacity
    • CloudWatch Alarms
      • allows SNS triggers to be configured when a particular metric goes beyond a specified threshold for a specified number of periods
    • Amazon EventBridge (formerly CloudWatch Events)
      • allows real-time stream of system events that describe changes in AWS resources
      • extends capabilities with partner event sources, Schema Registry, and EventBridge Pipes for point-to-point integrations
      • EventBridge Scheduler supports one-time and recurring schedules with built-in retry policies
    • AWS Systems Manager
      • provides operational management for AWS resources including patch management, configuration compliance, and automated runbooks
      • replaces the need for OpsWorks with features like State Manager, Automation, and Run Command
    • Lambda Scheduled Events
      • allows Lambda function creation and direct AWS Lambda to execute it on a regular schedule via EventBridge Scheduler.

Loose Coupling

  • AWS helps loose coupled architecture that reduces interdependencies, a change or failure in a component does not cascade to other components
    • Asynchronous Integration
      • does not involve direct point-to-point interaction but usually through an intermediate durable storage layer for e.g. SQS, Kinesis, EventBridge
      • decouples the components and introduces additional resiliency
      • suitable for any interaction that doesn’t need an immediate response and an ack that a request has been registered will suffice
    • Service Discovery
      • allows new resources to be launched or terminated at any point in time and discovered as well for e.g. using ELB as a single point of contact with hiding the underlying instance details or Route 53 zones to abstract load balancer’s endpoint
      • AWS Cloud Map provides service discovery for cloud resources, allowing applications to discover services via API calls, DNS queries, or directly through the SDK
    • Well-Defined Interfaces
      • allows various components to interact with each other through specific, technology agnostic interfaces for e.g. RESTful APIs with API Gateway
      • Amazon API Gateway supports REST APIs, HTTP APIs, and WebSocket APIs for real-time communication

Services, Not Servers

  • AWS encourages leveraging managed services and serverless architectures to reduce operational overhead
    • Serverless compute – AWS Lambda for event-driven functions, AWS Fargate for serverless containers
    • Managed databases – Amazon RDS, DynamoDB, Aurora Serverless for auto-scaling relational databases
    • Application integration – SQS, SNS, EventBridge, Step Functions for workflow orchestration
    • API management – API Gateway for creating, publishing, and managing APIs at scale

Databases

  • AWS provides different categories of database technologies
    • Relational Databases (RDS)
      • normalizes data into well-defined tabular structures known as tables, which consist of rows and columns
      • provide a powerful query language, flexible indexing capabilities, strong integrity controls, and the ability to combine data from multiple tables in a fast and efficient manner
      • allows vertical scalability by increasing resources and horizontal scalability using Read Replicas for read capacity and sharding or data partitioning for write capacity
      • provides High Availability using Multi-AZ deployment, where data is synchronously replicated
      • Amazon Aurora provides MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible databases with up to 5x and 3x better throughput respectively, with automatic storage scaling up to 128 TB
      • Aurora Serverless v2 scales capacity automatically based on application demand, ideal for variable workloads
    • NoSQL Databases (DynamoDB)
      • provides databases that trade some of the query and transaction capabilities of relational databases for a more flexible data model that seamlessly scales horizontally
      • perform data partitioning and replication to scale both the reads and writes in a horizontal fashion
      • DynamoDB service synchronously replicates data across three facilities in an AWS region to provide fault tolerance in the event of a server failure or Availability Zone disruption
      • DynamoDB Global Tables provide multi-region, active-active replication for globally distributed applications
      • DynamoDB On-Demand mode eliminates capacity planning by automatically scaling to accommodate workloads
    • Data Warehouse (Redshift)
      • Specialized type of relational database, optimized for analysis and reporting of large amounts of data
      • Redshift achieves efficient storage and optimum query performance through a combination of massively parallel processing (MPP), columnar data storage, and targeted data compression encoding schemes
      • Redshift MPP architecture enables increasing performance by increasing the number of nodes in the data warehouse cluster
      • Redshift Serverless automatically provisions and scales capacity, allowing analytics without cluster management
    • Purpose-Built Databases
      • Amazon ElastiCache – in-memory caching (Redis, Memcached) for sub-millisecond latency
      • Amazon Neptune – graph database for highly connected datasets
      • Amazon Timestream – time series database for IoT and operational applications
      • Amazon MemoryDB for Redis – Redis-compatible, durable, in-memory database
  • For more details refer to AWS Storage Options Whitepaper

Removing Single Points of Failure

  • AWS provides ways to implement redundancy, automate recovery and reduce disruption at every layer of the architecture
  • AWS supports redundancy in the following ways
    • Standby Redundancy
      • When a resource fails, functionality is recovered on a secondary resource using a process called failover.
      • Failover will typically require some time before it completes, and during that period the resource remains unavailable.
      • Secondary resource can either be launched automatically only when needed (to reduce cost), or it can be already running idle (to accelerate failover and minimize disruption).
      • Standby redundancy is often used for stateful components such as relational databases.
    • Active Redundancy
      • requests are distributed to multiple redundant compute resources, if one fails, the rest can simply absorb a larger share of the workload.
      • Compared to standby redundancy, it can achieve better utilization and affect a smaller population when there is a failure.
  • AWS supports replication
    • Synchronous replication
      • acknowledges a transaction after it has been durably stored in both the primary location and its replicas.
      • protects data integrity from the event of a primary node failure
      • used to scale read capacity for queries that require the most up-to-date data (strong consistency).
      • compromises performance and availability
    • Asynchronous replication
      • decouples the primary node from its replicas at the expense of introducing replication lag
      • used to horizontally scale the system’s read capacity for queries that can tolerate that replication lag.
    • Quorum-based replication
      • combines synchronous and asynchronous replication to overcome the challenges of large-scale distributed database systems
      • Replication to multiple nodes can be managed by defining a minimum number of nodes that must participate in a successful write operation
  • AWS provide services to reduce or remove single point of failure
    • Regions, Availability Zones with multiple data centers
    • ELB or Route 53 to configure health checks and mask failure by routing traffic to healthy endpoints
    • Auto Scaling to automatically replace unhealthy nodes
    • EC2 auto-recovery to recover unhealthy impaired nodes
    • S3, DynamoDB with data redundantly stored across multiple facilities
    • Multi-AZ RDS, Aurora (6 copies across 3 AZs), and Read Replicas
    • ElastiCache Redis engine supports replication with automatic failover
    • AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery (DRS) for continuous replication and automated recovery of on-premises and cloud-based applications
  • For more details refer to AWS Disaster Recovery Whitepaper

Optimize for Cost

  • AWS can help organizations reduce capital expenses and drive savings as a result of the AWS economies of scale
  • AWS provides different options which should be utilized as per use case –
    • EC2 pricing models:
      • On-Demand – pay per second/hour with no commitment
      • Savings Plans – commit to a consistent amount of usage (measured in $/hr) for 1 or 3 years; Compute Savings Plans (up to 66% savings) and EC2 Instance Savings Plans (up to 72% savings)
      • Reserved Instances – capacity reservation with up to 72% discount for 1 or 3 year terms
      • Spot Instances – up to 90% discount for fault-tolerant, flexible workloads using spare capacity
      • Dedicated Hosts – single-tenant hardware for compliance and BYOL licensing
    • AWS Graviton instances for up to 40% better price-performance over comparable x86 instances
    • AWS Cost Optimization Hub, Trusted Advisor, and AWS Compute Optimizer to identify cost savings opportunities
    • S3 storage classes:
      • S3 Standard – frequently accessed data
      • S3 Intelligent-Tiering – automatic cost optimization for data with unknown or changing access patterns
      • S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA) – infrequently accessed data
      • S3 One Zone-IA – infrequently accessed data not requiring multi-AZ resilience
      • S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval, Flexible Retrieval, and Deep Archive – long-term archive storage
      • S3 Express One Zone – single-digit millisecond latency for most frequently accessed data (up to 10x faster than S3 Standard)
    • EBS volumes – General Purpose SSD (gp3), Provisioned IOPS SSD (io2 Block Express), Throughput Optimized HDD (st1), Cold HDD (sc1). Note: Magnetic (standard) is a previous-generation volume type; gp3 is recommended as default.
    • Cost Allocation tags to identify costs based on tags
    • Auto Scaling to horizontally scale the capacity up or down based on demand
    • Lambda and Fargate based serverless architectures to never pay for idle or redundant resources
    • Utilize managed services where scaling is handled by AWS for e.g. ELB, CloudFront, Kinesis, SQS, Amazon OpenSearch Service etc.

Caching

  • Caching improves application performance and increases the cost efficiency of an implementation
    • Application Data Caching
      • provides services that help store and retrieve information from fast, managed, in-memory caches
      • Amazon ElastiCache is a web service that makes it easy to deploy, operate, and scale an in-memory cache in the cloud and supports two open-source in-memory caching engines: Memcached and Redis
      • Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) provides a fully managed, in-memory cache for DynamoDB with microsecond response times
    • Edge Caching
      • allows content to be served by infrastructure that is closer to viewers, lowering latency and giving high, sustained data transfer rates needed to deliver large popular objects to end users at scale.
      • Amazon CloudFront is Content Delivery Network (CDN) consisting of 600+ Points of Presence (edge locations and regional caches), that allows copies of static and dynamic content to be cached
      • CloudFront Functions and Lambda@Edge enable running code at edge locations for request/response manipulation

Security

  • AWS works on shared security responsibility model
    • AWS is responsible for the security of the underlying cloud infrastructure
    • you are responsible for securing the workloads you deploy in AWS
  • AWS also provides ample security features
    • IAM to define a granular set of policies and assign them to users, groups, and AWS resources
    • IAM roles to assign short term credentials to resources, which are automatically distributed and rotated
    • AWS IAM Identity Center (formerly AWS SSO) for centralized workforce identity management and single sign-on across AWS accounts and applications
    • Amazon Cognito, for mobile and web applications, which allows client devices to get controlled access to AWS resources via temporary tokens
    • VPC to isolate parts of infrastructure through the use of subnets, security groups, and routing controls
    • AWS WAF to help protect web applications from SQL injection, cross-site scripting, and other common exploits with managed rule groups
    • CloudWatch logs to collect logs centrally as the servers are temporary
    • CloudTrail for auditing AWS API calls, which delivers a log file to S3 bucket. Logs can then be stored in an immutable manner and automatically processed to either notify or even take action on your behalf, protecting your organization from non-compliance
    • AWS Security Hub – unified security posture management that aggregates findings from GuardDuty, Inspector, Macie, and partner tools with automated compliance checks
    • Amazon GuardDuty – intelligent threat detection using machine learning, anomaly detection, and integrated threat intelligence to identify malicious activity
    • Amazon Inspector – automated vulnerability management that continuously scans EC2 instances, container images (ECR), Lambda functions, and code repositories for software vulnerabilities
    • AWS Config for continuous compliance monitoring, and AWS Trusted Advisor for best practice recommendations across cost, performance, security, fault tolerance, and service limits
  • For more details refer to AWS Security Whitepaper

AWS Well-Architected Framework

  • The AWS Well-Architected Framework is the successor to this whitepaper and provides comprehensive guidance for building secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient infrastructure
  • The Framework is built on six pillars:
    • Operational Excellence – running and monitoring systems to deliver business value and continually improve processes and procedures
    • Security – protecting information and systems through risk assessments, mitigation strategies, and security best practices
    • Reliability – ensuring workloads perform correctly and consistently, with ability to recover from failures and meet demand
    • Performance Efficiency – using computing resources efficiently to meet requirements and maintain efficiency as demand changes
    • Cost Optimization – avoiding unnecessary costs through understanding spending, selecting the right resources, and scaling to meet needs without overspending
    • Sustainability (added 2021) – minimizing environmental impacts by reducing energy consumption and increasing efficiency of cloud workloads
  • The AWS Well-Architected Tool in the AWS Management Console allows workload reviews against framework best practices
  • AWS also provides Well-Architected Lenses for specific workload types (Serverless, SaaS, Machine Learning, Data Analytics, IoT, etc.)

References

 

AWS Pricing – Whitepaper – Certification

~ Last updated on : ~ jayendrapatil

AWS Pricing Overview

📌 Note: This post has been updated to reflect current AWS pricing models, tools, and features as of 2025. The original AWS Pricing Whitepaper (2016) has been superseded by the How AWS Pricing Works whitepaper (last revised December 2024).

AWS pricing features include

  • Pay as you go
    • No minimum contracts/commitments or long-term contracts required
    • Pay only for services you use that can be stopped when not needed
    • Each service is charged independently, providing flexibility to choose services as needed
  • Pay less when you reserve
    • Services like EC2 and RDS provide Reserved Instances, which offer significantly discounted rates (up to 72% off On-Demand)
    • Savings Plans offer flexible commitment-based pricing with up to 72% savings on compute (EC2, Lambda, Fargate) and database usage
  • Pay even less by using more
    • Services like storage and data transfer offer tiered pricing — the more the usage, the less you pay per gigabyte
    • Consolidated billing to consolidate multiple accounts and get tiering benefits across the organization
  • Pay even less as AWS grows
    • AWS works continuously to reduce costs by reducing data center hardware costs, improving operational efficiencies, lowering power consumption, and generally lowering the cost of doing business
    • AWS has announced over 130 price reductions since launch
  • Free services
    • AWS offers many services free of charge including VPC, Elastic Beanstalk, CloudFormation, IAM, Auto Scaling, OpsWorks, and Organizations (Consolidated Billing)
    • Note: While these services are free, resources provisioned by them (e.g., EC2 instances launched via Elastic Beanstalk) are charged at standard rates
  • AWS Free Tier
    • AWS Free Tier for customers to explore AWS services at no cost
    • ⚠️ Updated July 2025: For new accounts created after July 15, 2025, AWS replaced the traditional 12-month Free Tier with a credit-based model offering up to $200 in credits ($100 at sign-up + $100 earned through activities). Customers choose between a Free plan (6 months) and a Paid plan.
    • Existing accounts (created before July 15, 2025) retain the original 12-month Free Tier structure
    • Always Free offerings remain available (e.g., Lambda 1M requests/month, DynamoDB 25GB, CloudWatch 10 metrics)

AWS Pricing & Cost Management Tools

  • AWS Pricing Calculator — the current tool to estimate costs for AWS services. Provides per-service cost breakdown and aggregate monthly/annual estimates. Supports authenticated in-console mode (GA 2025) that incorporates your discounts and commitments.
    • Note: The AWS Simple Monthly Calculator was retired on March 31, 2023. The AWS TCO Calculator has also been retired. Use the AWS Pricing Calculator for all new estimates.
  • AWS Cost Explorer — visualize, understand, and manage AWS costs and usage over time with custom reports, forecasting, and Savings Plans/RI recommendations.
  • AWS Budgets — set custom budgets and receive alerts when costs or usage exceed thresholds.
  • AWS Cost and Usage Reports (CUR) — comprehensive and customizable reporting on AWS costs with granular line-item data.
  • AWS Billing and Cost Management Console — view current charges, account activity, itemized by service and usage type. Previous months’ billing statements are available.

AWS Pricing Fundamental Characteristics

  • AWS basically charges for
    • Compute
    • Storage
    • Data Transfer Out — aggregated across services (EC2, S3, RDS, DynamoDB, etc.) and charged at the outbound data transfer rate
  • AWS does not charge for
    • Inbound data transfer across all AWS services in all regions
    • Outbound data transfer between AWS services within the same region (in most cases)
  • ⚠️ Public IPv4 Address Charges (Effective Feb 1, 2024):
    • All public IPv4 addresses are charged at $0.005 per IP per hour (~$3.65/month), whether attached to a service or not
    • Applies to EC2, RDS, EKS, NAT Gateway, Load Balancers, VPN, and all services with public IPv4
    • Free Tier includes 750 hours of public IPv4 usage per month for the first 12 months
    • BYOIP (Bring Your Own IP) addresses are not charged
    • AWS recommends adopting IPv6 to reduce costs

AWS Savings Plans

Savings Plans are a flexible pricing model offering savings of up to 72% on AWS compute and database usage in exchange for a commitment to a consistent amount of usage (measured in $/hour) for a 1 or 3-year term.

  • Compute Savings Plans
    • Most flexible — automatically applies to EC2, Lambda, and Fargate usage
    • Up to 66% savings regardless of instance family, size, AZ, Region, OS, or tenancy
  • EC2 Instance Savings Plans
    • Up to 72% savings, applies to a specific instance family in a Region
    • Flexible across size, OS, and tenancy within the committed family
  • SageMaker Savings Plans
    • Up to 64% savings on SageMaker usage
  • Database Savings Plans (launched 2024)
    • Applies to RDS, Aurora, Redshift, Neptune, and other database services
    • 1-year term commitment with flexible coverage across database engines and instance types
  • Payment Options: All Upfront (best discount), Partial Upfront, or No Upfront

AWS Elastic Cloud Compute – EC2

EC2 provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud and the cost depends on –

  • Clock Hours of Server Time
    • Resources are charged for the time they are running
    • EC2 uses per-second billing (minimum 60 seconds) for Linux, Windows, and Ubuntu instances. Some commercial OS instances still use hourly billing.
  • Machine Configuration
    • Depends on the physical capacity — pricing varies with the AWS Region, OS, number of cores, memory, and processor architecture
    • AWS Graviton (Arm-based) instances offer up to 40% better price-performance compared to x86 instances
  • Machine Purchase Type
    • On-Demand Instances — pay for compute capacity per second/hour with no commitments
    • Reserved Instances — 1 or 3-year commitment for up to 72% discount (Standard and Convertible types)
    • Savings Plans — flexible commitment-based pricing (Compute or EC2 Instance plans) for up to 72% savings
    • Spot Instances — use spare EC2 capacity at up to 90% discount compared to On-Demand. Instances can be interrupted with 2-minute notice when capacity is needed back.
    • Dedicated Hosts — physical servers dedicated to your use, useful for licensing compliance
    • Capacity Reservations — reserve capacity in a specific AZ without commitment discount
  • Auto Scaling & Number of Instances
    • Auto Scaling automatically adjusts the number of EC2 instances based on demand
    • No additional charge for Auto Scaling — you pay only for the EC2 instances launched
  • Load Balancing
    • Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) distributes traffic among EC2 instances
    • Charged per Load Balancer Capacity Unit (LCU) per hour for ALB/NLB/GWLB, or per hour + data processed for CLB
  • CloudWatch Monitoring
    • Basic monitoring (5-minute intervals) is available at no additional cost
    • Detailed monitoring (1-minute intervals) is charged per metric per month
  • Elastic IP Addresses
    • ⚠️ Updated Feb 2024: All public IPv4 addresses (including Elastic IPs) are now charged at $0.005/hour whether in-use or idle
    • Previously, only unattached Elastic IPs were charged — this is no longer the case
    • Additional Elastic IPs on a running instance continue to be charged at $0.005/hour
  • Operating Systems and Software Packages
    • OS prices are included in the instance prices for Amazon Linux, Ubuntu, Windows, RHEL, SUSE, and other commercial OS options
    • Commercial software from AWS Marketplace incurs additional licensing costs

AWS Lambda

AWS Lambda lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers and the cost depends on

  • Number of Requests
    • Lambda registers a request each time it starts executing in response to an event notification or invoke call
    • Charges are for the total number of requests across all functions
    • Free Tier: 1 million requests per month (always free)
  • Duration
    • Calculated from the time code begins executing until it returns or terminates, rounded up to the nearest 1 millisecond (updated from 100ms in Dec 2020)
    • Price depends on the amount of memory allocated to the function (128 MB to 10,240 MB)
    • Free Tier: 400,000 GB-seconds per month (always free)
  • Processor Architecture
    • Functions running on ARM/Graviton2 architecture get 20% lower duration charges compared to x86, delivering up to 34% better price-performance
  • Tiered Pricing (introduced 2022)
    • Duration charges are tiered — higher usage tiers get lower per-GB-second rates
    • Applied separately for x86 and Arm architectures
  • Provisioned Concurrency
    • Optional feature to keep functions initialized — charged for provisioned concurrency amount plus duration and requests
  • INIT Phase Billing (effective August 1, 2025)
    • AWS standardized billing for the initialization (INIT) phase across all Lambda configurations
    • Previously, INIT phase for ZIP-packaged functions with managed runtimes was unbilled

AWS Simple Storage Service – S3

S3 provides object storage and the cost depends on

  • Storage Class
    • S3 Standard — frequently accessed data; 99.999999999% durability and 99.99% availability
    • S3 Intelligent-Tiering — automatically moves data between access tiers based on usage patterns; no retrieval charges; small monthly monitoring fee per object
    • S3 Express One Zone (launched Nov 2023) — single-digit millisecond latency, up to 10x faster than S3 Standard, 80% lower request costs; single AZ
    • S3 Standard-IA (Infrequent Access) — lower storage cost, retrieval fee applies; 99.9% availability
    • S3 One Zone-IA — lower cost than Standard-IA, stored in a single AZ; 99.5% availability
    • S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval — archive storage with millisecond retrieval
    • S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval (formerly S3 Glacier) — minutes to hours retrieval
    • S3 Glacier Deep Archive — lowest cost storage with 12-48 hour retrieval
  • Storage
    • Number and size of objects stored and the storage class selected
  • Requests & Data Retrievals
    • Number and type of requests (GET, PUT, COPY, LIST, etc.) — rates vary by request type and storage class
    • Retrieval fees apply for IA and Glacier classes
  • Data Transfer Out
    • Amount of data transferred out of S3 to the internet (tiered pricing)
    • Data transfer from S3 to CloudFront within the same Region is free (since 2024)
  • Management & Analytics
    • S3 Inventory, S3 Analytics, S3 Storage Lens, and Object Tagging have separate charges

AWS Elastic Block Store – EBS

EBS provides block level storage volumes and the cost depends on

  • Volumes
    • EBS provides multiple volume types:
      • General Purpose SSD (gp3, gp2) — gp3 is the latest generation, 20% lower cost per GB than gp2, with independently configurable IOPS and throughput
      • Provisioned IOPS SSD (io2 Block Express, io2, io1) — for I/O-intensive workloads; io2 Block Express supports up to 256,000 IOPS
      • Throughput Optimized HDD (st1) — for frequently accessed, throughput-intensive workloads
      • Cold HDD (sc1) — lowest cost for infrequently accessed data
    • Charged by the amount provisioned in GB per month until released
  • IOPS
    • gp3: 3,000 IOPS and 125 MiB/s included free; additional IOPS/throughput provisioned separately
    • gp2: IOPS scales with volume size (3 IOPS per GB)
    • io1/io2: Charged per provisioned IOPS per month
    • st1/sc1: No IOPS charges
  • Snapshots
    • Snapshots are stored incrementally in S3, charged per GB-month of data stored
    • EBS Snapshots Archive offers up to 75% lower snapshot storage cost for long-term retention
  • Data Transfer Out
    • Outbound data transfer charges are tiered

AWS Relational Database Service – RDS

RDS provides an easy-to-set-up, operate, and scale relational database in the cloud and the cost depends on

  • Clock Hours of Server Time
    • Resources are charged for the time they are running, from DB instance launch until termination
    • Stopped DB instances still incur storage costs (and are automatically restarted after 7 days)
  • Database Characteristics
    • Pricing varies with the database engine (MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Oracle, SQL Server, or Aurora), instance size, memory class, and processor (x86 vs. Graviton)
    • Graviton-based instances (r6g, r7g, r8g families) offer better price-performance than x86 equivalents
  • Database Purchase Type
    • On-Demand — pay per hour/second with no commitment
    • Reserved Instances — 1 or 3-year term for significant discounts
    • Database Savings Plans (launched 2024) — flexible commitment-based pricing across RDS, Aurora, Redshift, and Neptune
    • Aurora Serverless — pay per Aurora Capacity Unit (ACU) per second; scales to zero when idle
  • Provisioned Storage
    • Backup storage of up to 100% of provisioned database storage for an active DB Instance is not charged
    • After termination, backup storage is billed per GB per month
  • Additional Storage
    • Backup storage exceeding the free allocation is billed per GB per month
  • Requests (I/O)
    • Number of input and output requests to the database
    • Aurora I/O-Optimized configuration eliminates I/O charges in exchange for ~30% higher compute/storage cost
  • Deployment Type
    • Multi-AZ deployments cost approximately 2x Single-AZ for high availability
    • Multi-AZ with readable standbys (2 replicas) available for Aurora and RDS
  • Data Transfer Out
    • Outbound data transfer costs are tiered
    • Inbound data transfer is free
    • Data transfer between RDS and EC2 in the same AZ is free

AWS CloudFront

CloudFront is a web service for content delivery, distributing content to end users with low latency and high data transfer speeds with no minimum commitments.

  • Traffic Distribution
    • Data transfer and request pricing vary across geographic regions, based on the edge location through which content is served
  • Requests
    • Number and type of requests (HTTP or HTTPS) and the geographic region
  • Data Transfer Out
    • Amount of data transferred out of CloudFront edge locations to the internet
    • Data transfer from S3 origin to CloudFront is free (within the same Region)
  • Flat-Rate Pricing Plans (launched Nov 2025)
    • Fixed monthly fee bundling data transfer, requests, AWS WAF, Shield, DNS (Route 53), logging, and serverless edge compute
    • Includes monthly S3 storage credits
    • No overage charges — predictable pricing for website delivery and security
  • CloudFront Security Savings Bundle
    • Up to 30% savings on CloudFront charges in exchange for a monthly commit (1-year term)
    • Includes AWS WAF charges covered within the commitment

AWS Certification Exam Practice Questions

  • Questions are collected from Internet and the answers are marked as per my knowledge and understanding (which might differ with yours).
  • AWS services are updated everyday and both the answers and questions might be outdated soon, so research accordingly.
  • AWS exam questions are not updated to keep up the pace with AWS updates, so even if the underlying feature has changed the question might not be updated
  • Open to further feedback, discussion and correction.
  1. How does AWS charge for AWS Lambda?
    1. Users bid on the maximum price they are willing to pay per hour.
    2. Users choose a 1-, 3- or 5-year upfront payment term.
    3. Users pay for the required permanent storage on a file system or in a database.
    4. Users pay based on the number of requests and consumed compute resources.
  2. Which AWS pricing model provides the MOST flexibility without long-term commitment?
    1. Reserved Instances
    2. Savings Plans
    3. On-Demand
    4. Spot Instances
  3. Which tool should be used to estimate costs for a new AWS architecture?
    1. AWS Simple Monthly Calculator
    2. AWS Pricing Calculator
    3. AWS Cost Explorer
    4. AWS Budgets

    Note: The Simple Monthly Calculator was retired in March 2023. AWS Pricing Calculator is the current tool.

  4. Starting February 2024, which statement about AWS public IPv4 addresses is correct?
    1. Only idle Elastic IP addresses are charged
    2. All public IPv4 addresses are charged at $0.005/hour whether in-use or idle
    3. Public IPv4 addresses are free for the first 12 months only
    4. Only addresses not associated with EC2 instances are charged
  5. Which AWS Savings Plan type offers the MOST flexibility?
    1. EC2 Instance Savings Plans
    2. Compute Savings Plans
    3. SageMaker Savings Plans
    4. Database Savings Plans

    Explanation: Compute Savings Plans automatically apply across EC2, Lambda, and Fargate regardless of instance family, size, Region, or OS.

  6. A company wants to reduce EC2 costs by up to 90% but can tolerate interruptions. Which purchase option should they use?
    1. Reserved Instances
    2. On-Demand Instances
    3. Spot Instances
    4. Savings Plans
  7. Which S3 storage class automatically moves objects between access tiers to optimize costs?
    1. S3 Standard
    2. S3 Standard-IA
    3. S3 Intelligent-Tiering
    4. S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval

References

AWS Associate Certification Exams – Preparation – Sample Questions

~ Last updated on : ~ jayendrapatil ~ 181 Comments

AWS Associate Certification Exams – Preparation & Study Guide

📋 2026 Certification Update

AWS certifications have undergone significant changes since this post was originally written. Key updates include:

  • AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate (SOA-C02) was retired on September 29, 2025 and replaced by the AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer – Associate (SOA-C03)
  • AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate is now on exam version SAA-C03 (updated August 2022)
  • AWS now offers 12+ active certifications including new AI/ML certifications
  • AWS Skill Builder is now the primary official training platform with 900+ free courses

This guide has been updated to reflect current exam versions, resources, and preparation strategies.

AWS Certification Landscape (2026)

AWS currently offers certifications across four levels:

Foundational (No prerequisite experience)

  • AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02) – Cloud concepts, billing, security – $100, 90 mins, 65 questions
  • AWS Certified AI Practitioner (AIF-C01) – AI/ML/GenAI concepts and use cases – $100, 90 mins, 65 questions

Associate (1+ year hands-on experience recommended)

  • AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) – Architecture design – $150, 130 mins, 65 questions
  • AWS Certified Developer – Associate (DVA-C02) – Application development – $150, 130 mins, 65 questions
  • AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer – Associate (SOA-C03) – Cloud operations (formerly SysOps Administrator) – $150, 130 mins, 65 questions
  • AWS Certified Data Engineer – Associate (DEA-C01) – Data pipelines and analytics – $150, 130 mins, 65 questions
  • AWS Certified Machine Learning Engineer – Associate (MLA-C01) – ML solutions and pipelines – $150, 130 mins, 65 questions

Professional (2+ years experience recommended)

  • AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional (SAP-C02) – $300, 180 mins, 75 questions
  • AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional (DOP-C02) – $300, 180 mins, 75 questions
  • AWS Certified Generative AI Developer – Professional – Foundation models, RAG, responsible AI – $300

Specialty

  • AWS Certified Security – Specialty (SCS-C02) – $300, 170 mins, 65 questions
  • AWS Certified Advanced Networking – Specialty (ANS-C01) – $300, 170 mins, 65 questions

Note: AWS Certified Machine Learning – Specialty was retired March 31, 2026, replaced by the ML Engineer Associate certification.

AWS Associate Certification Exam Preparation (2026 Guide)

AWS Associate certifications remain the most popular entry point for cloud professionals. Here is a comprehensive preparation strategy based on the current exam formats:

Recommended Preparation Resources

Exam Preparation Tips

  • AWS Associate certifications cover a broad range of services but focus heavily on architectural decision-making rather than memorization
  • The SAA-C03 exam emphasizes the Well-Architected Framework pillars: Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, Cost Optimization, and Sustainability
  • Hands-on experience is highly recommended – use the AWS Free Tier to practice with core services
  • AWS services are updated continuously; the exam tests current best practices and service capabilities
  • Focus on understanding when to use which service rather than deep implementation details for Associate-level exams
  • All Associate exams are 65 questions in 130 minutes (approximately 2 minutes per question)
  • A scaled score of 720 out of 1000 is required to pass
  • Exam Time Tip: Only mark questions you genuinely doubt as “Mark for Review.” Marking too many wastes valuable review time
  • After passing, you receive a 50% discount voucher for your next AWS certification exam and a free official practice exam

AWS Solutions Architect Associate (SAA-C03) – Exam Domains

The SAA-C03 exam (current version since August 2022) covers four domains:

  • Domain 1: Design Secure Architectures (30%)
    • Secure access to AWS resources
    • Secure workloads and applications
    • Determine appropriate data security controls
  • Domain 2: Design Resilient Architectures (26%)
    • Scalable and loosely coupled architectures
    • Highly available and fault-tolerant architectures
  • Domain 3: Design High-Performing Architectures (24%)
    • Storage, compute, database, and networking solutions for performance
  • Domain 4: Design Cost-Optimized Architectures (20%)
    • Cost-effective storage, compute, and database solutions
    • Cost-effective network architectures

AWS CloudOps Engineer Associate (SOA-C03) – Formerly SysOps Administrator

⚠️ Important: The AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate (SOA-C02) was retired on September 29, 2025. It has been replaced by the AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer – Associate (SOA-C03). The new exam reflects modern cloud operations practices including automation, observability, and infrastructure as code.

The CloudOps Engineer exam focuses on:

  • Monitoring, logging, and observability
  • Automation and infrastructure as code
  • Security and compliance operations
  • Reliability and business continuity
  • Cost and performance optimization
  • Networking and content delivery operations

AWS Associate Certification – Important Topics

💡 Note: AWS SWF (Simple Workflow Service) is a legacy service rarely tested in current exams. AWS Step Functions is the modern replacement and is heavily tested in SAA-C03 and DVA-C02.

Preparation Strategy – Week-by-Week Plan

For candidates with some AWS hands-on experience, a 4-8 week study plan works well:

  • Weeks 1-2: Complete a video course (Stéphane Maarek or Adrian Cantrill) covering all domains
  • Weeks 3-4: Read AWS documentation for key services, practice with the Free Tier, review FAQs
  • Weeks 5-6: Take practice exams (Tutorials Dojo, Whizlabs, or AWS official), review incorrect answers thoroughly
  • Weeks 7-8: Focus on weak areas, retake practice exams targeting 80%+, review whitepapers

Target Score: Aim for consistently scoring 80%+ on practice exams before scheduling your real exam.

Related Posts

References

AWS Storage Options – SQS & Redshift

~ Last updated on : ~ jayendrapatil ~ 13 Comments

SQS

  • is a fully managed message queuing service that provides a reliable, highly scalable, hosted queue for temporary storage and delivery of messages up to 1 MiB in size (increased from 256 KB in August 2025).
  • supports a virtually unlimited number of queues and supports two queue types:
    • Standard queues – unordered, at-least-once delivery with nearly unlimited throughput.
    • FIFO queues – exactly-once processing with strict message ordering, supporting up to 70,000 messages per second with high throughput mode.

Ideal Usage Patterns

  • is ideally suited to any scenario where multiple application components must communicate and coordinate their work in a loosely coupled manner particularly producer consumer scenarios.
  • can be used to coordinate a multi-step processing pipeline, where each message is associated with a task that must be processed.
  • enables the number of worker instances to scale up or down, and also enable the processing power of each single worker instance to scale up or down, to suit the total workload, without any application changes.
  • ideal for multi-tenant workloads using fair queues (launched July 2025) to mitigate noisy neighbor impact and ensure consistent processing across tenants.
  • supports event-driven architectures with AWS Lambda event source mapping, including provisioned mode for 3x faster scaling and 16x higher concurrency.

Anti-Patterns

  • Binary or Large Messages
    • SQS supports messages up to 1 MiB. If the application requires binary or messages exceeding this limit, it is best to use the Amazon SQS Extended Client Library with Amazon S3 to store the payload and SQS to store the pointer.
  • Long Term storage
    • SQS stores messages for max 14 days and if application requires storage period longer than 14 days, Amazon S3 or other storage options should be preferred.
  • High-speed message queuing or very short tasks
    • If the application requires a very high-speed message send and receive response from a single producer or consumer, use of Amazon DynamoDB or a message-queuing system hosted on Amazon EC2 may be more appropriate.

Performance

  • is a distributed queuing system that is optimized for horizontal scalability, not for single-threaded sending or receiving speeds.
  • Standard queues support nearly unlimited throughput (thousands of transactions per second per API action).
  • FIFO queues support up to 3,000 messages per second with batching by default, or up to 70,000 messages per second (700,000 with batching) in high throughput mode in select regions.
  • FIFO queues support up to 120,000 in-flight messages (increased from 20,000 in November 2024).
  • Higher receive performance can be achieved by requesting multiple messages (up to 10) in a single call.
  • Fair queues (July 2025) automatically reorder messages to maintain consistent dwell time across tenants, preventing noisy neighbors from impacting processing latency.

Durability & Availability

  • are highly durable but temporary.
  • stores all messages redundantly across multiple servers and data centers.
  • Message retention time is configurable on a per-queue basis, from a minimum of one minute to a maximum of 14 days.
  • Messages are retained in a queue until they are explicitly deleted, or until they are automatically deleted upon expiration of the retention time.
  • supports dead-letter queues (DLQ) for isolating messages that fail processing, with DLQ redrive capability to move messages back to the source queue or a custom destination for reprocessing.

Cost Model

  • pricing is based on
    • number of requests (per million requests)
    • the amount of data transferred out (priced per GB per month)
    • First 1 million requests per month are free (Free Tier)

Scalability & Elasticity

  • is both highly elastic and massively scalable.
  • is designed to enable a virtually unlimited number of computers to read and write a virtually unlimited number of messages at any time.
  • supports virtually unlimited numbers of queues and messages per queue for any user.
  • supports dual-stack (IPv4 and IPv6) endpoints for flexible network access.

Key Features (Recent Updates)

  • Message payload size increased to 1 MiB (August 2025) – supports larger messages for both standard and FIFO queues without needing the Extended Client Library.
  • Fair queues (July 2025) – automatically mitigates noisy neighbor impact in multi-tenant standard queues by reordering messages to maintain consistent dwell time across tenants.
  • FIFO high throughput mode – up to 70,000 TPS per API action (November 2023), enabling 700,000 messages per second with batching.
  • FIFO in-flight limit increase (November 2024) – increased from 20,000 to 120,000 in-flight messages per FIFO queue.
  • Lambda provisioned mode for SQS (January 2025) – dedicated polling resources providing 3x faster scaling and 16x higher concurrency for event source mapping.
  • Dead-letter queue redrive – move failed messages from DLQ back to source queue or a custom destination for both standard and FIFO queues.
  • Simplified KMS permissions – SendMessage no longer requires kms:Decrypt permission; only kms:GenerateDataKey is needed.
  • Temporary queues – application-managed virtual queues for request-response patterns that reduce cost and development time.

Amazon Redshift

  • is a fast, fully-managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service that makes it simple and cost-effective to efficiently analyze all data using existing business intelligence tools.
  • is optimized for datasets that range from a few hundred gigabytes to a petabyte or more.
  • manages the work needed to set up, operate, and scale a data warehouse, from provisioning the infrastructure capacity to automating ongoing administrative tasks such as backups and patching.
  • offers two deployment models: Provisioned clusters (RA3 and new RG instances) and Redshift Serverless (pay-per-use with automatic scaling).
⚠️ Important: Amazon Redshift DC2 instances reached End of Life on April 24, 2026. New DC2 clusters cannot be created since May 15, 2025. Migrate to RA3 instances, RG instances (Graviton-powered, GA May 2026), or Redshift Serverless. DS2 instances were previously deprecated in favor of RA3.

Ideal Usage Pattern

  • is ideal for analyzing large datasets using existing business intelligence tools.
  • Common use cases include
    • Analyze global sales data for multiple products
    • Store historical stock trade data
    • Analyze ad impressions and clicks
    • Aggregate gaming data
    • Analyze social trends
    • Measure clinical quality, operation efficiency, and financial performance in the health care space
    • Near real-time analytics using zero-ETL integrations from Aurora, DynamoDB, RDS, and SaaS applications
    • Data lakehouse analytics querying data in S3 data lakes using Redshift Spectrum
    • Generative AI applications using Amazon Bedrock integration for sentiment analysis, text generation, and summarization directly on warehouse data

Anti-Pattern

  • OLTP workloads
    • Redshift is a column-oriented database and more suited for data warehousing and analytics. If application involves online transaction processing, Amazon RDS or Aurora would be a better choice.
  • Blob data
    • For Blob storage, Amazon S3 would be a better choice with metadata in other storage as RDS or DynamoDB.

Performance

  • Amazon Redshift allows very high query performance on datasets ranging in size from hundreds of gigabytes to a petabyte or more.
  • It uses columnar storage, data compression, and zone maps to reduce the amount of I/O needed to perform queries.
  • It has a massively parallel processing (MPP) architecture that parallelizes and distributes SQL operations to take advantage of all available resources.
  • Underlying hardware is designed for high performance data processing that uses local attached storage to maximize throughput.
  • New RG instances (GA May 2026) powered by AWS Graviton deliver up to 2.4x faster performance than RA3 at 30% lower price per vCPU.
  • AI-driven scaling and optimization in Redshift Serverless automatically provisions and scales capacity for demanding workloads.
  • Query performance improvements (March 2026) speed up new queries in BI dashboards and ETL workloads by up to 7x.
  • Concurrency scaling automatically adds additional cluster capacity to handle burst read and write workloads, with support for data ingestion (COPY queries in Parquet/ORC from S3).

Durability & Availability

  • Amazon Redshift stores three copies of your data—all data written to a node in your cluster is automatically replicated to other nodes within the cluster, and all data is continuously backed up to Amazon S3.
  • Snapshots are automated, incremental, and continuous and stored for a user-defined period (1-35 days).
  • Manual snapshots can be created and are retained until explicitly deleted.
  • Amazon Redshift continuously monitors the health of the cluster and automatically re-replicates data from failed drives and replaces nodes as necessary.
  • Multi-AZ deployments (GA for RA3 clusters) run your data warehouse across two Availability Zones simultaneously, providing continued operation during AZ failure scenarios.

Cost Model

  • Provisioned clusters pricing:
    • Compute node hours – total hours run across all compute nodes (RA3 or RG instances)
    • Redshift Managed Storage (RMS) – billed per GB/month, separate from compute (RA3/RG only)
    • Backup storage – for automated and manual snapshots beyond the free tier
    • Data transfer – standard AWS data transfer charges apply
    • Concurrency scaling – free for 1 hour per day per cluster, then per-second billing
    • Spectrum – per TB of data scanned in S3
  • Redshift Serverless pricing:
    • Compute – per RPU-hour (Redshift Processing Unit), billed per second with no charge when idle
    • Storage – per GB/month for managed storage
  • Reserved Instance pricing available for provisioned clusters (1-year or 3-year terms) for significant discounts.

Scalability & Elasticity

  • Provisioned clusters – Elastic resize allows adding or removing nodes within minutes. Classic resize available for node type changes.
  • Redshift Serverless – automatically scales compute capacity up and down based on workload demands with no cluster management required.
  • Data sharing allows securely sharing live, transactionally consistent data across Redshift clusters (cross-account, cross-region) without copying data.
  • Multi-warehouse writes through data sharing (GA November 2024) enable using different warehouses of different types and sizes for ETL workloads.

Key Features (Recent Updates)

  • RG Instances (GA May 2026) – New Graviton-powered instance family delivering 2.4x faster performance than RA3 at 30% lower price per vCPU.
  • DC2 End of Life (April 24, 2026) – Migrate to RA3, RG, or Serverless. New DC2 cluster creation blocked since May 15, 2025.
  • Redshift Serverless – Pay-per-use model with automatic scaling, AI-driven optimization, and per-second billing with no charge when idle.
  • Zero-ETL integrations – Near real-time data replication from Aurora, DynamoDB, RDS, and self-managed databases to Redshift without building ETL pipelines. Also supports SaaS sources (Salesforce, SAP, Zendesk).
  • Multi-AZ deployments – Run RA3 provisioned clusters across two Availability Zones for high availability.
  • Amazon Bedrock integration (October 2024) – Run generative AI tasks (text generation, sentiment analysis, summarization, classification) directly on Redshift data using foundation models via SQL.
  • Amazon Q generative SQL – Generate SQL from natural language prompts in the Redshift Query Editor.
  • Data sharing – Share live data across clusters, accounts, and regions without data movement. Supports multi-warehouse writes for ETL.
  • Redshift Spectrum – Query exabytes of data in S3 without loading it into Redshift, enabling data lakehouse architectures.
  • Concurrency scaling for ingestion (2026) – Automatically scales for COPY queries in Parquet/ORC formats from S3 during traffic spikes.
  • 7x query performance improvement (March 2026) – Faster response for BI dashboards, ETL pipelines, and near real-time analytics.

AWS Storage Options – CloudFront & ElastiCache

~ Last updated on : ~ jayendrapatil

Amazon CloudFront

  • is a webservice for content delivery
  • provides low latency by caching and delivering content from a global network of 750+ Points of Presence (PoPs) across 100+ cities in 50+ countries
  • supports HTTP/HTTPS for static and dynamic content delivery
  • optimized to work with Amazon services like S3, ELB, MediaConvert etc. as well as works seamlessly with any non-AWS origin server
⚠️ Note: CloudFront RTMP distributions were discontinued on December 31, 2020. For streaming, use HTTP-based streaming protocols (HLS, DASH) with CloudFront web distributions and AWS Elemental MediaConvert.

Ideal Usage Patterns

  • is ideal for distribution of frequently accessed static content, or dynamic content or for streaming audio or video that benefits from edge delivery
  • API acceleration and real-time content personalization at the edge
  • security at the edge with integrated WAF, DDoS protection, and bot management

Anti-Pattern

  • Infrequently accessed data
    • If the data is infrequently accessed, it would be better to serve the data from the Origin server
  • Programmatic cache invalidation
    • CloudFront supports cache invalidation, however AWS recommends using object versioning rather than programmatic cache invalidation.

Performance

  • is designed for low latency and high bandwidth delivery of content by redirecting the user to the nearest edge location in terms of latency and caching the content preventing the round trip to the origin server
  • supports HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 (QUIC) for improved connection performance

Durability & Availability

  • provides high Availability by delivering content from a distributed global network of edge locations. Amazon also constantly monitors the network paths connecting Origin servers to CloudFront
  • does not provide durable storage, which is more of the responsibility of the underlying Origin server providing the content for e.g. S3

Cost Model

  • has pay-as-you-go pricing with two main components:
    • regional data transfer out (per GB) and
    • requests (per 10,000)
  • Flat-Rate Pricing Plans (launched Nov 2025) — combine CloudFront CDN, AWS WAF, DDoS protection, bot management, Route 53 DNS, CloudWatch Logs, edge compute, and S3 storage credits into one monthly price with no overage charges

Scalability & Elasticity

  • provides seamless scalability & elasticity by automatically responding to the increase or the decrease in the demand

Edge Compute

  • CloudFront Functions — lightweight functions for high-scale, latency-sensitive request/response transformations (URL rewrites, header manipulation, redirects) executed at 750+ PoPs
  • Lambda@Edge — more powerful compute triggered at regional edge caches for complex logic (authentication, dynamic origin selection, content generation)
  • CloudFront KeyValueStore (launched 2023) — globally distributed, low-latency data store for CloudFront Functions enabling dynamic configuration (A/B testing, feature flags, geo-routing) without code redeployment

Security

  • Origin Access Control (OAC) — recommended method to restrict S3 origin access to CloudFront only, replacing the legacy Origin Access Identity (OAI). OAI creation was deprecated in 2024; new distributions since March 2026 can only use OAC.
  • AWS Shield Standard — included automatically with every CloudFront distribution for DDoS protection at no extra cost
  • AWS WAF integration — protect against web exploits and bots at the edge
  • Field-Level Encryption — encrypt sensitive data fields at the edge before forwarding to origin

ElastiCache

  • is a fully managed, serverless caching service that makes it easy to deploy, operate, and scale distributed in-memory caches in the cloud
  • helps improves performance of the applications by allowing retrieval of data from fast, managed, in-memory caching system with microsecond latency and up to 99.99% availability SLA
  • supports three open-source caching engines:
    • Valkey (recommended for new workloads) — open-source fork of Redis OSS 7.2, stewarded by the Linux Foundation (BSD-3 licensed)
    • Memcached — simple object caching engine
    • Redis OSS — key-value store (note: Redis OSS 7.2 is the last fully open-source Redis version)
🆕 Valkey Engine (Oct 2024): AWS recommends Valkey for new workloads. It provides 33% lower Serverless pricing and 20% lower node-based pricing compared to Redis OSS, with better performance and active open-source development. Valkey is a drop-in replacement for Redis OSS 7.2 and can be upgraded in-place.

Deployment Modes

  • ElastiCache Serverless (launched Nov 2023)
    • zero infrastructure management with instant auto-scaling
    • pay-per-use pricing based on data stored (GB-hour) and ElastiCache Processing Units (ECPUs)
    • creates a cache in under a minute; starts as low as $6/month with Valkey
    • zero downtime maintenance
  • Node-based (self-designed clusters)
    • fine-grained control over node type, count, and placement
    • supports Reserved Nodes for cost savings
    • Graviton3-based nodes available for better price-performance

Ideal Usage Patterns

  • improving application performance by storing critical data in-memory for low latency access
  • use cases involve usage as a database front end for read heavy applications, improving performance and reducing load on databases, or managing user session data, cache dynamically generated pages, or compute intensive calculations etc.
  • Real-time search (2026) — full-text, exact-match, numeric range, and hybrid search with microsecond latency
  • Vector similarity search — AI-driven semantic retrieval for RAG and recommendation systems

Anti-Patterns

  • Persistent Data
    • If the application needs fast access to data coupled with strong data durability, Amazon DynamoDB would be a better option
    • Note: ElastiCache for Valkey now supports durability with Multi-AZ transactional log (June 2026), enabling fast failover and data recovery without data loss

Performance

  • provides microsecond read latency and single-digit millisecond write latency with throughput up to millions of requests per second
  • Valkey 9.0 (May 2026) introduces enhanced search capabilities with full-text, hybrid, and aggregation queries directly in the cache

Durability & Availability

  • provides up to 99.99% availability SLA with Multi-AZ deployments
  • With the Memcached engine
    • all ElastiCache nodes in a single cache cluster are provisioned in a single Availability Zone.
    • ElastiCache automatically monitors the health of your cache nodes and replaces them in the event of network partitioning, host hardware, or software failure.
    • In the event of cache node failure, the cluster remains available, but performance may be reduced due to time needed to repopulate the cache in the new “cold” cache nodes.
    • To provide enhanced fault-tolerance for Availability Zone failures or cold-cache effects, you can run redundant cache clusters in different Availability Zones.
  • With the Valkey/Redis OSS engine,
    • ElastiCache supports replication to up to five read replicas for scaling. To improve availability, you can place read replicas in other Availability Zones.
    • ElastiCache monitors the primary node, and if the node becomes unavailable, ElastiCache will repair or replace the primary node if possible, using the same DNS name.
    • If the primary cache node recovery fails or its Availability Zone is unavailable, primary node can be failed over to one of the read replicas with an API call.
    • Durability support (June 2026): Multi-AZ transactional log enables data persistence across AZs, preventing data loss during failover, recovery, and node restarts.

Cost Model

  • offers two pricing models:
    • Serverless: pay-per-use based on data stored (GB-hour) and ECPUs consumed. Valkey Serverless is 33% cheaper than Redis OSS Serverless.
    • Node-based: pricing per cache node-hour consumed. Supports Reserved Nodes for up to 55% savings.

Scalability & Elasticity

  • ElastiCache is highly scalable and elastic.
  • Serverless: instantly auto-scales to match application demand with no capacity planning
  • Node-based: Cache nodes can be added or deleted from the cache cluster. Auto Discovery enables automatic discovery of Memcached cache nodes by ElastiCache Clients when the nodes are added to or removed from an ElastiCache cluster.

 

Storage Options Whitepaper – Storage Gateway – Import/Export – AWS Certification

~ Last updated on : ~ jayendrapatil ~ 8 Comments

AWS Storage Options – Storage Gateway & Import/Export (Snow Family)

Provides a brief summary for the Ideal Use cases and Anti-Patterns for AWS Storage Gateway and AWS Snow Family (formerly Import/Export) storage options.

📌 2025/2026 Update: This post has been significantly updated to reflect current AWS service terminology and availability:

  • Storage Gateway now offers four gateway types: S3 File Gateway, FSx File Gateway (no longer available to new customers), Volume Gateway, and Tape Gateway.
  • AWS Import/Export was replaced by AWS Snowball (2015), and the Snow Family is being significantly reduced — Snowmobile retired (March 2024), Snowcone discontinued (Nov 2024), and Snowball Edge restricted to existing customers only (Nov 2025).
  • AWS Data Transfer Terminal is the new physical data transfer alternative for new customers.

AWS Storage Gateway

  • AWS Storage Gateway is a hybrid cloud storage service that provides on-premises access to virtually unlimited cloud storage.
  • Storage Gateway provides a standard set of storage protocols such as iSCSI, SMB, and NFS, which allow you to use AWS storage without rewriting existing applications.
  • It provides low-latency performance by maintaining frequently accessed data on-premises while securely storing all data encrypted in AWS.
  • For disaster recovery scenarios, it can serve as a cloud-hosted solution, together with EC2, that mirrors the entire production environment.
  • Storage Gateway can be deployed as a virtual machine (VM) within VMware, Hyper-V, or Linux KVM virtual environments, or as an Amazon EC2 instance within a VPC, or on a dedicated hardware appliance.
  • Storage Gateway offers four gateway types:
    • Amazon S3 File Gateway
      • Presents Amazon S3 objects as files accessible via NFS or SMB protocols.
      • On-premises applications read and write files to the gateway, which stores them as objects in S3 buckets.
      • Maintains a local cache of recently accessed files for low-latency retrieval.
      • Supports S3 Standard, S3 Intelligent-Tiering, S3 Standard-IA, and S3 One Zone-IA storage classes.
    • Amazon FSx File Gateway
      • Provides low-latency, on-premises access to fully managed Windows file shares in Amazon FSx for Windows File Server.
      • ⚠️ No longer available to new customers as of October 28, 2024. Existing customers can continue using the service. AWS recommends connecting directly to Amazon FSx for Windows File Server as an alternative.
    • Volume Gateway
      • Presents cloud-backed iSCSI block storage volumes to on-premises applications.
      • Operates in two modes:
        • Cached volumes (formerly Gateway-cached volumes) – Primary data stored in S3, with frequently accessed data retained locally in a cache. Minimizes the need to scale on-premises storage while providing low-latency access to frequently accessed data.
        • Stored volumes (formerly Gateway-stored volumes) – Complete primary data stored locally, while asynchronously backing up data to AWS as EBS snapshots. Provides low-latency access to entire datasets with durable, off-site backups.
      • Cached volumes can be up to 32 TiB; stored volumes can be up to 16 TiB.
    • Tape Gateway
      • Presents a virtual tape library (VTL) interface to existing backup applications using iSCSI.
      • Virtual tapes are stored in S3, and archived tapes are stored in S3 Glacier or S3 Glacier Deep Archive.
      • Compatible with leading backup software (Veeam, Veritas NetBackup, Commvault, etc.).

Ideal Usage Patterns

  • AWS Storage Gateway use cases include
    • Corporate file sharing and collaboration (S3 File Gateway)
    • Enabling on-premises backup applications to store primary backups in S3 (Volume Gateway, Tape Gateway)
    • Disaster recovery with cloud-backed storage
    • Data mirroring to cloud-based compute resources
    • Tiering on-premises data to cloud storage

Anti-Patterns

  • Database storage
    • For Database backup or storage, EC2 instances using EBS volumes or managed database services (RDS, Aurora) are better choices.

Performance

  • Performance depends on the speed and configuration of underlying local disks, network bandwidth between the iSCSI initiator and gateway VM, amount of local storage allocated to the gateway VM, and bandwidth between the gateway VM and AWS.
  • For cached volumes, providing enough local cache storage for recently accessed data is important for low-latency read access.
  • Storage Gateway efficiently uses Internet bandwidth by only uploading incremental changes (data that has changed), minimizing data sent over the Internet.
  • AWS Direct Connect can be used to increase throughput and reduce network costs by establishing a dedicated network connection between the on-premises gateway and AWS.
  • Storage Gateway supports bandwidth throttling to control the amount of network bandwidth used for data transfer.

Durability and Availability

  • AWS Storage Gateway durably stores on-premises application data by uploading it to S3.
  • S3 stores data across multiple facilities and on multiple devices within each facility, providing 99.999999999% (11 9s) durability.
  • S3 performs regular, systematic data integrity checks and is built to be automatically self-healing.

Cost Model

  • AWS Storage Gateway pricing components vary by gateway type:
    • S3 File Gateway: Storage (S3 pricing), requests, and data transfer
    • Volume Gateway: Volume storage usage (per GB per month), snapshot storage, and data transfer
    • Tape Gateway: Virtual tape storage, virtual tape shelf (archive) storage, and data retrieval
    • All types: No charge for the gateway software; charges apply for AWS storage used

Scalability and Elasticity

  • Storage Gateway stores data in Amazon S3, which provides virtually unlimited scalability and elasticity.
  • A single gateway supports up to 32 cached volumes (max 1,024 TiB total) or 32 stored volumes (max 512 TiB total).

Interfaces

  • AWS Management Console, AWS CLI, and AWS SDKs can be used to manage Storage Gateway.
  • Gateway VM images are available for VMware ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Linux KVM.
  • Hardware appliance option is available for environments without virtualization infrastructure.
  • Volumes are attached as iSCSI devices; file shares are accessible via NFS or SMB protocols.

AL2 to AL2023 Migration (2025-2026)

  • AWS is transitioning Storage Gateway appliance OS from Amazon Linux 2 to AL2023.
  • This migration enables new hybrid cloud storage features and maintains optimal performance and security.
  • Gateway versions 1.x.x cannot be updated to 2.x.x — a new gateway deployment is required.

AWS Import/Export (Replaced by AWS Snow Family)

⚠️ SERVICE DEPRECATED & SIGNIFICANTLY REDUCED

AWS Import/Export (the original ship-your-own-disk service) was fully replaced by AWS Snowball in 2015.

AWS Snow Family Current Status (2025):

  • AWS Snowmobile — Retired (March 2024). Service is no longer available.
  • AWS Snowcone (HDD & SSD) — Discontinued November 12, 2024. Support for existing customers ended November 12, 2025.
  • Previous generation Snowball devices (80TB Storage Optimized, 52 vCPU Compute Optimized, Compute Optimized with GPU) — Discontinued November 12, 2024.
  • AWS Snowball Edge (latest generation) — Only available to existing customers as of November 7, 2025. New customers cannot order Snowball Edge devices.

Alternatives for New Customers:

  • AWS DataSync — For online data transfers when network bandwidth is available
  • AWS Data Transfer Terminal — For secure physical data transfers at AWS-managed locations
  • AWS Partner solutions — Third-party data migration services

AWS Snow Family (Current Service)

  • AWS Snow Family provides secure, rugged devices for edge computing and offline data transfer.
  • AWS Snowball Edge is the primary device, available in two options:
    • Snowball Edge Storage Optimized (210 TB) — Primary device for large data transfers with high storage capacity and faster transfer speeds.
    • Snowball Edge Compute Optimized — For edge computing workloads requiring local processing power.
  • Data encryption is performed on the device itself, enabling higher data throughput and shorter transfer times.
  • Supports Amazon S3 compatible storage on the device for edge workloads.

AWS Data Transfer Terminal (New Alternative)

  • AWS Data Transfer Terminal is a secure, physical location where customers bring their storage devices to transfer data using a high-throughput connection directly to AWS.
  • Provides direct network connectivity to AWS services including Amazon S3, Amazon EFS, and others.
  • Available in multiple locations globally (New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco Bay Area, Munich, and more being added).
  • Customers reserve a date and time, visit the location, connect their storage devices, and transfer data.
  • No device shipping required — eliminates wait times associated with Snowball device logistics.
  • Ideal for customers who need frequent, high-volume physical data transfers.

Original AWS Import/Export (Historical Reference)

  • AWS Import/Export (now fully replaced) accelerated moving large amounts of data into and out of AWS using portable storage devices for transport.
  • AWS transferred data directly onto and off of storage devices using Amazon’s high-speed internal network, bypassing the Internet.
  • Supported importing into EBS snapshots, S3 buckets, and Glacier vaults, and exporting data from S3.

Ideal Usage Patterns (Snow Family / Data Transfer Terminal)

  • Ideal for transferring large amounts of data in and out of the AWS cloud, especially in cases where transferring the data over the Internet would be too slow (a week or more) or too costly.
  • Common use cases include:
    • Initial data migration to AWS (large-scale lift-and-shift)
    • Content distribution or regular data interchange with customers/business associates
    • Transfer to Amazon S3 for off-site backup and archival storage
    • Edge computing in disconnected environments (Snowball Edge only)
    • Disaster recovery with rapid data retrieval

Anti-Patterns

  • Data that is more easily transferred over the Internet in less than one week — use AWS DataSync or AWS Transfer Family instead.
  • For new customers needing physical data transfer (post Nov 2025) — use AWS Data Transfer Terminal or AWS Partner solutions.

Performance

  • Snowball Edge Storage Optimized 210TB devices provide up to 100 Gbps network connectivity.
  • Data transfer rate is bounded by the read/write speed of the storage device and network connectivity.
  • AWS Data Transfer Terminal provides high-throughput direct connections for fast transfers.

Durability and Availability

  • Durability and availability characteristics of the target storage (S3, EBS, EFS) apply after data has been imported.
  • Snowball Edge devices use 256-bit encryption and tamper-resistant enclosures for data security during transit.

Cost Model

  • AWS Snowball Edge pricing includes: service fee per job, shipping costs, and per-day charges for device use beyond included days.
  • Standard Amazon S3, EBS, and other storage pricing applies for the destination storage.
  • AWS Data Transfer Terminal pricing is based on reservation time and data transferred.

Scalability and Elasticity

  • Multiple Snowball Edge devices can be used in parallel for petabyte-scale transfers.
  • Large Data Migration Manager available in the AWS Console for managing multi-device migration projects.
  • For Amazon S3, individual objects may range up to 5 terabytes in size.
  • Aggregate total amount of data that can be imported is virtually unlimited.

Interfaces

  • AWS Snowball is managed through the AWS Management Console (OpsHub), AWS CLI, and SDKs.
  • AWS OpsHub provides a graphical interface for managing Snow devices.
  • AWS Data Transfer Terminal is managed through the AWS Management Console for reservations.

AWS Certification Exam Practice Questions

  • Questions are collected from Internet and the answers are marked as per my knowledge and understanding (which might differ with yours).
  • AWS services are updated everyday and both the answers and questions might be outdated soon, so research accordingly.
  • AWS exam questions are not updated to keep up the pace with AWS updates, so even if the underlying feature has changed the question might not be updated
  • Open to further feedback, discussion and correction.
  1. You are working with a customer who has 10 TB of archival data that they want to migrate to Amazon Glacier. The customer has a 1-Mbps connection to the Internet. Which service or feature provides the fastest method of getting the data into Amazon Glacier?
    1. Amazon Glacier multipart upload
    2. AWS Storage Gateway
    3. VM Import/Export
    4. AWS Import/Export (Now: AWS Snowball)

    Note: This question uses legacy service names. AWS Import/Export has been replaced by AWS Snowball Edge. As of Nov 2025, Snowball Edge is only available to existing customers — new customers should use AWS Data Transfer Terminal.

  2. A company needs to provide on-premises applications with low-latency access to frequently used data while storing the complete dataset in AWS for disaster recovery. Which Storage Gateway configuration is most appropriate?
    1. S3 File Gateway with local cache
    2. Volume Gateway in cached mode
    3. Volume Gateway in stored mode
    4. Tape Gateway
    Show Answer

    Answer: C – Volume Gateway in stored mode keeps the complete primary data locally for low-latency access to the entire dataset, while asynchronously backing up data to AWS as EBS snapshots for disaster recovery.

  3. A company wants to minimize on-premises storage costs while maintaining low-latency access to frequently accessed data. The full dataset is several hundred terabytes. Which Storage Gateway solution is most suitable?
    1. S3 File Gateway
    2. Volume Gateway in cached mode
    3. Volume Gateway in stored mode
    4. Tape Gateway
    Show Answer

    Answer: B – Volume Gateway in cached mode stores primary data in S3 while retaining frequently accessed data locally in a cache, minimizing on-premises storage requirements.

  4. A new customer needs to physically transfer 50 TB of data to AWS but cannot use AWS Snowball Edge (no longer available to new customers as of November 2025). What is the recommended alternative?
    1. AWS Snowcone
    2. AWS Snowmobile
    3. AWS Data Transfer Terminal
    4. AWS Import/Export with customer-owned devices
    Show Answer

    Answer: C – AWS Data Transfer Terminal provides secure, physical locations where customers can bring their storage devices and transfer data using high-throughput connections to AWS. Snowcone and Snowmobile are discontinued, and Import/Export was replaced by Snowball in 2015.

  5. Which AWS Storage Gateway type would you recommend for a company that wants to replace their physical tape backup infrastructure with cloud-based backup while keeping existing backup software?
    1. S3 File Gateway
    2. Volume Gateway
    3. Tape Gateway
    4. FSx File Gateway
    Show Answer

    Answer: C – Tape Gateway presents a virtual tape library (VTL) interface compatible with existing backup applications, allowing companies to replace physical tape infrastructure while maintaining their current backup workflows.

AWS Storage Options – RDS, DynamoDB & Database on EC2

~ Last updated on : ~ jayendrapatil ~ 17 Comments

AWS Storage Options Whitepaper with RDS, DynamoDB & Database on EC2 Cont.

Provides a brief summary for the Ideal Use cases, Anti-Patterns and other factors for Amazon RDS, DynamoDB & Databases on EC2 storage options

📝 Note: The original AWS Storage Services Overview whitepaper has been archived by AWS. This content is maintained and updated with current service capabilities for certification study reference. See the AWS Overview – Storage Services for the latest official guidance.

Amazon RDS

  • RDS is a fully managed relational database service supporting Amazon Aurora, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server database engines
  • RDS eliminates much of the administrative overhead associated with launching, managing, and scaling your own relational database on Amazon EC2 or in another computing environment.
  • RDS provides automated patching, backups, Multi-AZ high availability, read replicas, and monitoring out of the box.

Key Features (Updated 2024-2026)

  • Multi-AZ DB Cluster Deployments – deploys a primary and two readable standby instances across three AZs, providing faster failover (~35 seconds), improved commit latency via semisynchronous replication, and readable standbys (MySQL/PostgreSQL)
  • Blue/Green Deployments – creates a fully managed staging (green) environment that mirrors production (blue), allowing safe testing of major version upgrades and schema changes with minimal downtime switchover
  • RDS Proxy – a fully managed database proxy that pools and shares connections, improving application scalability, resilience to database failovers, and security via IAM/Secrets Manager authentication
  • RDS Data API – available for Aurora (Serverless v2 and provisioned), enables secure HTTP-based SQL execution without managing database drivers or connections
  • Aurora Serverless v2 – auto-scales database capacity in fine-grained increments based on application demand, scaling to hundreds of thousands of transactions per second
  • Aurora DSQL (launched Dec 2024) – a serverless, distributed SQL database with active-active multi-Region high availability, PostgreSQL-compatible, with strong consistency across all Regional endpoints
  • RDS Custom – provides OS and database access for Oracle and SQL Server when full administrative control is needed (Note: RDS Custom for Oracle reaches end of support March 31, 2027)
  • Graviton (ARM) Instances – M7g, R7g, M7i, R7i instance types offering better price-performance
  • gp3 Storage – baseline of 3,000 IOPS and 125 MiB/s, scalable up to 80,000 IOPS and 2,000 MiB/s per volume (up to 64 TiB per volume)
  • Extended Support – up to 3 additional years of critical security and bug fixes beyond community end-of-life for major engine versions

Ideal Usage Patterns

  • RDS is a great solution for cloud-based fully-managed relational database
  • RDS is also optimal for new applications with structured data that requires more sophisticated querying and joining capabilities than that provided by Amazon’s NoSQL database offering, DynamoDB.
  • RDS provides full compatibility with the databases supported and direct access to native database engines, code and libraries and is ideal for existing applications that rely on these databases
  • Applications requiring zero-downtime upgrades can leverage Blue/Green Deployments for safe major version changes
  • Serverless and event-driven applications benefit from RDS Proxy and Aurora Serverless v2 for connection management and auto-scaling

Anti-Patterns

  • Index and query-focused data
    • If the applications don’t require advanced features such as joins and complex transactions and is more oriented toward indexing and querying data, DynamoDB would be more appropriate for this needs
  • Numerous BLOBs
    • If the application makes heavy use of files (audio files, videos, images, etc), it is a better choice to use S3 to store the objects instead of database engines Blob feature and use RDS or DynamoDB only to save the metadata
  • Automated scalability
    • RDS provides vertical scaling (scale up) and limited horizontal scale-out via read replicas. For fully-automated serverless scaling, consider Aurora Serverless v2 or DynamoDB.
  • Complete control
    • RDS does not provide full OS-level admin access.
    • If the application requires complete OS-level control, consider RDS Custom (for Oracle/SQL Server) or a self-managed database on EC2.
  • Other database platforms
    • RDS supports Aurora, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Oracle, and SQL Server.
    • If any other database platform (such as IBM DB2, Informix, or Sybase) is needed, it should be deployed on a self-managed database on an EC2 instance.

Performance

  • RDS offers multiple storage types optimized for different workloads:
    • gp3 (General Purpose SSD) – baseline 3,000 IOPS, scalable up to 80,000 IOPS and 2,000 MiB/s throughput, up to 64 TiB per volume
    • io1/io2 (Provisioned IOPS SSD) – designed for I/O-intensive transactional workloads, up to 256,000 IOPS
  • Multi-AZ DB Cluster deployments provide improved write commit latency through optimized semisynchronous replication
  • Performance Insights provides a dashboard to monitor database load and identify bottlenecks
  • RDS Optimized Reads/Writes (Aurora) provide up to 2x faster query processing and 6x higher write throughput

Durability and Availability

  • RDS leverages Amazon EBS volumes as its data store
  • RDS provides database backups, for enhanced durability, which are replicated across multiple AZ’s
    • Automated backups
      • RDS automatically performs a full daily backup during the specified backup window, and captures DB transaction logs (up to 35-day retention)
    • User initiated backups (DB Snapshots)
      • User can initiate manual snapshots at any time; they are retained until explicitly deleted
  • Multi-AZ DB Instance – synchronously replicates data to a standby in another AZ with automatic failover (typically 60-120 seconds)
  • Multi-AZ DB Cluster – maintains a primary and two readable standbys across three AZs with faster failover (~35 seconds) and transaction log-based replication
  • RDS provides a DNS endpoint; in case of failure on the primary, it automatically fails over to the standby instance
  • RDS Read Replicas provide asynchronous replication for read scaling and can be promoted for disaster recovery (including cross-Region replicas)

Cost Model

  • RDS offers a tiered pricing structure based on instance size, deployment type (Single-AZ/Multi-AZ Instance/Multi-AZ Cluster), and AWS Region
  • Pricing components: DB instance hours, provisioned storage (per GB-month), I/O requests (for io1/io2), additional backup storage, and data transfer
  • Reserved Instances provide significant discounts (up to 69%) for 1-year or 3-year commitments
  • Aurora Serverless v2 charges per Aurora Capacity Unit (ACU) consumed per second

Scalability and Elasticity

  • RDS resources can be scaled in several dimensions: storage size, IOPS, instance compute capacity, and number of read replicas
  • Storage Auto Scaling automatically increases storage when approaching capacity limits
  • Aurora Auto Scaling automatically adjusts the number of Aurora Replicas based on demand
  • Aurora Serverless v2 scales compute capacity automatically in fine-grained increments (0.5 ACU) from minimum to maximum configured capacity
  • Read Replicas (up to 15 for Aurora, 5 for other engines) enable read scaling across AZs and Regions
  • Aurora Limitless Database provides horizontal write scaling by automatically sharding data across multiple writer instances

Interfaces

  • RDS APIs, AWS CLI, and the AWS Management Console provide management interfaces for creating, modifying, and managing DB instances
  • RDS Data API (Aurora) provides a secure HTTP endpoint for running SQL statements without managing database connections or drivers
  • Once a database is created, RDS provides a DNS endpoint for the database which can be used to connect using standard database drivers
  • Endpoint does not change over the lifetime of the instance, even during failover in Multi-AZ configurations
  • RDS Proxy endpoints provide connection pooling and improved failover handling for applications

Amazon DynamoDB

  • Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed, serverless NoSQL database service that delivers single-digit millisecond performance at any scale.
  • DynamoDB offers zero infrastructure management, zero downtime maintenance, and automatic scaling to accommodate any workload demand.
  • DynamoDB provides both eventually-consistent reads (by default) and strongly-consistent reads (optional), as well as ACID transactions (TransactWriteItems, TransactGetItems) for coordinated operations across multiple items and tables.
  • Amazon DynamoDB handles data as follows:
    • DynamoDB stores structured data in tables, indexed by primary key, and allows low-latency read and write access to items.
    • DynamoDB supports rich data types: Scalar (String, Number, Binary, Boolean, Null), Document (List, Map), and Set (String Set, Number Set, Binary Set)
    • Tables do not have a fixed schema, so each data item can have a different number of attributes.
    • Primary key can either be a single-attribute partition key (hash key) or a composite partition key + sort key (hash-range key).
    • Local Secondary Indexes (LSI) – alternate sort key on the same partition key (defined at table creation)
    • Global Secondary Indexes (GSI) – alternate partition key and optional sort key, can be added/modified anytime

Key Features (Updated 2024-2026)

  • On-Demand Capacity Mode – pay-per-request pricing with no capacity planning; automatically scales to accommodate workload demand. 50% price reduction effective November 2024.
  • Global Tables – fully managed, multi-Region, multi-active replication with two consistency modes:
    • Multi-Region Eventual Consistency (MREC) – default mode, typically sub-second replication
    • Multi-Region Strong Consistency (MRSC) – GA 2025, provides zero RPO with strongly consistent reads/writes across all Regions
  • DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) – fully managed, in-memory cache providing microsecond read latency for read-heavy workloads
  • Standard-IA Table Class – lower storage cost option (up to 60% cheaper storage) for infrequently accessed data
  • PartiQL – SQL-compatible query language for DynamoDB, enabling familiar SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE syntax
  • Zero-ETL Integrations – seamless data replication to Amazon Redshift, OpenSearch Service, and SageMaker Lakehouse without building ETL pipelines
  • S3 Import/Export – bulk import data from S3 and export table data to S3 in DynamoDB JSON or Amazon Ion format
  • Point-in-Time Recovery (PITR) – continuous backups with per-second granularity, restorable to any point within a configurable 1-35 day window
  • Encryption at Rest – enabled by default using AWS owned keys, with options for AWS managed key or customer managed KMS key
  • DynamoDB Streams / Kinesis Data Streams – capture item-level changes for event-driven architectures, real-time analytics, and cross-Region replication

Ideal Usage Patterns

  • DynamoDB is ideal for applications that need a flexible NoSQL database with low read and write latencies, and the ability to scale storage and throughput up or down as needed without code changes or downtime.
  • Use cases requiring a highly available and scalable database e.g., mobile apps, gaming, digital ad serving, live voting, sensor networks, log ingestion, access control, metadata storage for S3 objects, e-commerce shopping carts, web session management, and serverless applications
  • Event-driven architectures leveraging DynamoDB Streams to trigger Lambda functions or downstream processing
  • Global applications requiring multi-Region active-active deployments with Global Tables

Anti-Patterns

  • Structured data with Join and/or Complex Transactions
    • If the application uses structured data and requires complex joins, multi-table transactions, or relationship infrastructure provided by traditional relational databases, RDS or Aurora would be a better choice. (Note: DynamoDB does support ACID transactions within and across tables, but not SQL-style joins.)
  • Large Blob data
    • DynamoDB has a maximum item size of 400 KB. For large media files, videos, etc., use S3 for storage and DynamoDB for metadata.
  • Large Objects with Low I/O rate
    • DynamoDB uses SSD drives and is optimized for high I/O workloads. If the application stores very large amounts of infrequently accessed data, S3 or the Standard-IA table class might be more cost-effective.
  • Complex ad-hoc analytics
    • For complex analytical queries across large datasets, use DynamoDB zero-ETL integration with Amazon Redshift or export to S3 for Athena queries.

Performance

  • SSDs and limited indexing on attributes provides single-digit millisecond latency at any scale.
  • Provisioned capacity mode – define exact read/write capacity units for predictable workloads with optional auto-scaling
  • On-demand capacity mode – automatically accommodates up to double previous peak traffic instantly, with further scaling within minutes
  • DAX (DynamoDB Accelerator) – in-memory cache providing microsecond response times for eventually consistent reads
  • DynamoDB automatically partitions data to maintain consistent performance as tables grow.

Durability and Availability

  • DynamoDB automatically and synchronously replicates data across three AZs in a Region for high availability and data protection against facility failures.
  • Global Tables provide multi-Region replication with 99.999% availability SLA (multi-Region)
  • PITR provides continuous backups for point-in-time restore capability
  • On-demand backups allow full table backups at any time without performance impact

Cost Model

  • DynamoDB offers two capacity modes:
    • On-Demand – pay per read/write request (no capacity planning). 50% price reduction since November 2024.
    • Provisioned – pay per hour for provisioned Read/Write Capacity Units (with optional auto-scaling and Reserved Capacity discounts)
  • Additional pricing components: data storage (per GB-month), Global Tables replication (per replicated write unit), backups, data export/import, DynamoDB Streams reads, and data transfer
  • Standard-IA table class reduces storage costs by up to 60% with higher per-request costs (ideal when storage dominates)
  • Global Tables pricing reduced by up to 67% (November 2024)

Scalability and Elasticity

  • DynamoDB is both highly-scalable and elastic with virtually unlimited storage and throughput capacity.
  • Data is automatically partitioned and re-partitioned as needed, while SSD storage provides predictable low-latency at any scale.
  • On-Demand mode provides truly serverless scaling with no capacity planning required
  • Provisioned mode with Auto Scaling automatically adjusts capacity based on utilization targets
  • DynamoDB can handle more than 10 trillion requests per day and support peaks of more than 100 million requests per second.

Interfaces

  • DynamoDB provides a low-level REST API, AWS SDKs in multiple languages, and the AWS CLI
  • PartiQL – SQL-compatible query language supported via Console, CLI, SDKs, and NoSQL Workbench
  • APIs provide both management and data interfaces: table management (create, list, delete, describe) and item operations (Get, Put, Update, Delete, Query, Scan, BatchWrite, BatchGet, TransactWrite, TransactGet)
  • DynamoDB Streams API – captures ordered sequence of item-level changes
  • NoSQL Workbench – visual tool for data modeling, visualization, and query development

Databases on EC2

  • EC2 with EBS volumes allows hosting a self-managed relational database with full OS and database administrative control
  • Ready-to-use, prebuilt AMIs are available from leading database vendors in AWS Marketplace
  • Note: With the introduction of RDS Custom (for Oracle and SQL Server), the need for self-managed databases on EC2 has decreased for these specific engines

Ideal Usage Patterns

  • Self-managed database on EC2 is ideal for applications that require a specific database platform not supported by Amazon RDS e.g., IBM DB2, Informix, Sybase, or specialized configurations
  • Applications requiring maximum level of administrative control and configurability including custom storage engines, specialized replication, or kernel-level tuning not available in RDS or RDS Custom
  • Database versions or configurations not yet supported by RDS

Anti-Patterns

  • Index and query-focused data
    • If the applications don’t require advanced features such as joins and complex transactions and is more oriented toward indexing and querying data, DynamoDB would be more appropriate
  • Numerous BLOBs
    • If the application makes heavy use of files (audio files, videos, images), use S3 for object storage and RDS or DynamoDB for metadata
  • Managed service available
    • If RDS supports the database engine and provides the needed features, RDS is preferred for reduced operational overhead. For Oracle/SQL Server requiring OS access, consider RDS Custom before self-managing on EC2.
  • Automated scalability
    • Self-managed databases require manual or scripted scaling operations. If fully-automated scaling is needed, DynamoDB, Aurora Serverless, or RDS with Auto Scaling may be better choices.

Performance

  • Performance depends on the EC2 instance type, number/configuration of EBS volumes, and database tuning
  • Scale up by choosing larger instance types (compute-optimized, memory-optimized) or Graviton-based instances for better price-performance
  • For storage: use gp3 or io2 Block Express EBS volumes. Use software RAID 0 (disk striping) across multiple EBS volumes for aggregated IOPS and bandwidth
  • Instance store (NVMe SSDs) can provide very high IOPS for temporary/cache workloads

Durability & Availability

  • Uses EBS for storage with same durability guarantees (99.999% availability for io2 Block Express)
  • Enhanced durability via EBS snapshots, cross-Region replication, or third-party backup tools (e.g., Oracle RMAN) to S3
  • High availability requires manual configuration: Multi-AZ replication, clustering solutions, or automated failover scripts

Cost Model

  • Cost determined by: EC2 instance size/type, EBS volume size and IOPS, data transfer, and any third-party database licensing costs
  • Savings Plans and Reserved Instances reduce EC2 compute costs for steady-state workloads
  • BYOL (Bring Your Own License) options available for Oracle, SQL Server, and other commercial databases

Scalability & Elasticity

  • Leverage EC2 scalability by creating AMIs for horizontal scaling, though database-specific clustering/sharding is required
  • Vertical scaling requires instance stop/start (brief downtime without clustering)
  • Auto Scaling groups can manage read replica fleets for read-heavy workloads

Comparison: RDS vs DynamoDB vs Database on EC2

Factor Amazon RDS DynamoDB Database on EC2
Type Managed Relational (SQL) Managed NoSQL (Key-Value/Document) Self-Managed Relational
Scaling Vertical + Read Replicas; Aurora Serverless for auto-scaling Fully automatic (on-demand) or provisioned with auto-scaling Manual vertical/horizontal
Availability Multi-AZ (2 or 3 AZs), automated failover Automatic across 3 AZs; Global Tables for multi-Region Manual HA configuration required
Admin Overhead Low (managed patching, backups) None (serverless) High (full responsibility)
Use Case Complex queries, joins, ACID transactions High-speed key-value access, flexible schema, massive scale Unsupported engines, full OS control

AWS Certification Exam Practice Questions

  • Questions are collected from Internet and the answers are marked as per my knowledge and understanding (which might differ with yours).
  • AWS services are updated everyday and both the answers and questions might be outdated soon, so research accordingly.
  • AWS exam questions are not updated to keep up the pace with AWS updates, so even if the underlying feature has changed the question might not be updated
  • Open to further feedback, discussion and correction.
  1. Which of the following are use cases for Amazon DynamoDB? Choose 3 answers
    1. Storing BLOB data.
    2. Managing web sessions
    3. Storing JSON documents
    4. Storing metadata for Amazon S3 objects
    5. Running relational joins and complex updates.
    6. Storing large amounts of infrequently accessed data.
  2. A client application requires operating system privileges on a relational database server. What is an appropriate configuration for highly available database architecture?
    1. A standalone Amazon EC2 instance
    2. Amazon RDS in a Multi-AZ configuration
    3. Amazon EC2 instances in a replication configuration utilizing a single Availability Zone
    4. Amazon EC2 instances in a replication configuration utilizing two different Availability Zones

    Note: With the introduction of RDS Custom, this question’s context has evolved. RDS Custom for SQL Server now supports Multi-AZ. However, for full OS-level control beyond what RDS Custom offers, EC2 remains the answer.

  3. You are developing a new mobile application and are considering storing user preferences in AWS, which would provide a more uniform cross-device experience to users using multiple mobile devices to access the application. The preference data for each user is estimated to be 50KB in size. Additionally 5 million customers are expected to use the application on a regular basis. The solution needs to be cost-effective, highly available, scalable and secure, how would you design a solution to meet the above requirements?
    1. Setup an RDS MySQL instance in 2 availability zones to store the user preference data. Deploy a public facing application on a server in front of the database to manage security and access credentials
    2. Setup a DynamoDB table with an item for each user having the necessary attributes to hold the user preferences. The mobile application will query the user preferences directly from the DynamoDB table. Utilize STS. Web Identity Federation, and DynamoDB Fine Grained Access Control to authenticate and authorize access (DynamoDB provides high availability as it synchronously replicates data across three facilities within an AWS Region and scalability as it is designed to scale its provisioned throughput up or down while still remaining available. Also suitable for storing user preference data)
    3. Setup an RDS MySQL instance with multiple read replicas in 2 availability zones to store the user preference data. The mobile application will query the user preferences from the read replicas. Leverage the MySQL user management and access privilege system to manage security and access credentials.
    4. Store the user preference data in S3 Setup a DynamoDB table with an item for each user and an item attribute pointing to the user’ S3 object. The mobile application will retrieve the S3 URL from DynamoDB and then access the S3 object directly utilize STS, Web identity Federation, and S3 ACLs to authenticate and authorize access.
  4. A customer is running an application in US-West (Northern California) region and wants to setup disaster recovery failover to the Asian Pacific (Singapore) region. The customer is interested in achieving a low Recovery Point Objective (RPO) for an Amazon RDS multi-AZ MySQL database instance. Which approach is best suited to this need?
    1. Synchronous replication
    2. Asynchronous replication (Cross-Region Read Replicas use asynchronous replication. Note: DynamoDB Global Tables with MRSC now offers zero RPO across Regions for NoSQL workloads.)
    3. Route53 health checks
    4. Copying of RDS incremental snapshots
  5. You are designing a file-sharing service. This service will have millions of files in it. Revenue for the service will come from fees based on how much storage a user is using. You also want to store metadata on each file, such as title, description and whether the object is public or private. How do you achieve all of these goals in a way that is economical and can scale to millions of users?
    1. Store all files in Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). Create a bucket for each user. Store metadata in the filename of each object, and access it with LIST commands against the S3 API.
    2. Store all files in Amazon S3. Create Amazon DynamoDB tables for the corresponding key-value pairs on the associated metadata, when objects are uploaded.
    3. Create a striped set of 4000 IOPS Elastic Load Balancing volumes to store the data. Use a database running in Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) to store the metadata.
    4. Create a striped set of 4000 IOPS Elastic Load Balancing volumes to store the data. Create Amazon DynamoDB tables for the corresponding key-value pairs on the associated metadata, when objects are uploaded.
  6. Company ABCD has recently launched an online commerce site for bicycles on AWS. They have a “Product” DynamoDB table that stores details for each bicycle, such as, manufacturer, color, price, quantity and size to display in the online store. Due to customer demand, they want to include an image for each bicycle along with the existing details. Which approach below provides the least impact to provisioned throughput on the “Product” table?
    1. Serialize the image and store it in multiple DynamoDB tables
    2. Create an “Images” DynamoDB table to store the Image with a foreign key constraint to the “Product” table
    3. Add an image data type to the “Product” table to store the images in binary format
    4. Store the images in Amazon S3 and add an S3 URL pointer to the “Product” table item for each image
  7. A company needs to store IoT sensor data from thousands of devices. The data is small (under 1KB per reading), arrives at unpredictable rates, and must be queryable by device ID and timestamp with single-digit millisecond latency. Which database solution is most appropriate?
    1. Amazon RDS MySQL with Multi-AZ
    2. Self-managed Cassandra on EC2
    3. Amazon DynamoDB with on-demand capacity mode (DynamoDB with on-demand mode is ideal: handles unpredictable workloads without capacity planning, supports composite key (device ID as partition key, timestamp as sort key), and provides single-digit millisecond latency)
    4. Amazon Aurora Serverless
  8. A company wants to perform real-time analytics on data stored in their DynamoDB table without impacting production read/write performance. Which approach is the most operationally efficient?
    1. Create a read replica of the DynamoDB table
    2. Export data to S3 on a scheduled basis and query with Athena
    3. Use DynamoDB zero-ETL integration with Amazon Redshift (Zero-ETL integration provides near real-time data replication to Redshift without building custom pipelines or impacting DynamoDB performance)
    4. Use DynamoDB Streams with a Lambda function to copy data to RDS

AWS Storage Options – S3 & Glacier

~ Last updated on : ~ jayendrapatil ~ 30 Comments

📋 Post Updated: June 2026

This post has been updated to reflect the current AWS S3 storage classes (8 classes as of 2025), the deprecation of standalone Amazon Glacier vaults, S3 Glacier storage class renaming, removal of S3 Reduced Redundancy Storage (RRS) recommendation, and new S3 capabilities including S3 Tables, S3 Vectors, and S3 Express One Zone.

Amazon S3

  • highly-scalable, reliable, and low-latency data storage infrastructure at very low costs.
  • provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from within Amazon EC2 or from anywhere on the web.
  • allows you to write, read, and delete objects containing from 1 byte to 5 terabytes of data each.
  • number of objects you can store in an Amazon S3 bucket is virtually unlimited.
  • highly secure, supporting encryption at rest and in transit, and providing multiple mechanisms to provide fine-grained control of access to Amazon S3 resources.
  • as of January 5, 2023, all new objects are automatically encrypted with SSE-S3 (server-side encryption with S3 managed keys) at no additional cost.
  • highly scalable, allowing concurrent read or write access to Amazon S3 data by many separate clients or application threads.
  • provides data lifecycle management capabilities, allowing users to define rules to automatically transition data between storage classes (including S3 Glacier classes) or delete data at end of life.
  • stores data redundantly across a minimum of 3 Availability Zones by default (except One Zone classes), providing built-in resilience against widespread disaster.

S3 Storage Classes

Amazon S3 offers 8 storage classes designed for different access patterns and cost requirements:

  • S3 Standard – General-purpose storage for frequently accessed data. High throughput and low latency.
  • S3 Intelligent-Tiering – Automatic cost optimization by moving data between access tiers (Frequent, Infrequent, Archive Instant Access) based on changing access patterns, with no retrieval charges or operational overhead.
  • S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA) – For data accessed less frequently but requiring rapid access when needed. Lower storage cost with per-GB retrieval charge.
  • S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access (S3 One Zone-IA) – Lower-cost option for infrequently accessed data that does not require multi-AZ resilience. Replaces the legacy Reduced Redundancy Storage (RRS).
  • S3 Express One Zone – Single-digit millisecond data access with up to 10x faster performance and 80% lower request costs than S3 Standard. Data stored in a single Availability Zone. Ideal for latency-sensitive applications like ML training and analytics.
  • S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval – Lowest-cost storage for long-lived data rarely accessed (once per quarter) that requires millisecond retrieval. 68% lower cost than S3 Standard-IA.
  • S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval (formerly S3 Glacier) – For archive data accessed once or twice per year. Retrieval options: Expedited (1-5 minutes), Standard (3-5 hours), or free Bulk (5-12 hours). Minimum 90-day storage.
  • S3 Glacier Deep Archive – Lowest-cost storage class for long-term archive and digital preservation. Retrieval: Standard (within 12 hours) or Bulk (within 48 hours). Minimum 180-day storage.

Ideal Use Cases

  • Storage & Distribution of static web content and media
    • frequently used to host static websites and provides a highly-available and highly-scalable solution for websites with only static content, including HTML files, images, videos, and client-side scripts such as JavaScript
    • works well for fast growing websites hosting data intensive, user-generated content, such as video and photo sharing sites as no storage provisioning is required
    • content can either be directly served from Amazon S3 since each object in Amazon S3 has a unique HTTP URL address
    • can also act as an Origin store for the Content Delivery Network (CDN) such as Amazon CloudFront
    • it works particularly well for hosting web content with extremely spiky bandwidth demands because of S3’s elasticity
  • Data Store for Large Objects
    • can be paired with RDS or NoSQL database and used to store large objects for e.g. file or objects, while the associated metadata for e.g. name, tags, comments etc. can be stored in RDS or NoSQL database where it can be indexed and queried providing faster access to relevant data
  • Data store for computation and large-scale analytics
    • commonly used as a data store for computation and large-scale analytics, such as analyzing financial transactions, clickstream analytics, and media transcoding.
    • data can be accessed from multiple computing nodes concurrently without being constrained by a single connection because of its horizontal scalability
    • S3 Tables (launched Dec 2024) provides storage optimized for tabular data in Apache Iceberg format, with up to 3x faster query throughput for analytics workloads
  • Backup and Archival of critical data
    • used as a highly durable, scalable, and secure solution for backup and archival of critical data, and to provide disaster recovery solutions for business continuity.
    • stores objects redundantly on multiple devices across multiple facilities, it provides the highly-durable storage infrastructure needed for these scenarios.
    • it’s versioning capability is available to protect critical data from inadvertent deletion
  • AI and Machine Learning
    • S3 Vectors (GA Dec 2025) provides native vector storage with subsecond query performance for AI embeddings, reducing costs up to 90% compared to dedicated vector databases
    • integrated with Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases for retrieval augmented generation (RAG) workloads
  • Data Lakes
    • S3 serves as the foundation for building data lakes, with native integration with analytics services like Amazon Athena, Amazon EMR, and Amazon Redshift Spectrum
    • Mountpoint for Amazon S3 (GA Aug 2023) allows mounting S3 buckets as local file systems on Linux compute instances for high-throughput workloads

Anti-Patterns

Amazon S3 has following Anti-Patterns where it is not an optimal solution

  • Dynamic website hosting
    • While Amazon S3 is ideal for hosting static websites, dynamic websites requiring server side interaction, scripting or database interaction cannot be hosted and should rather be hosted on Amazon EC2 or AWS Lambda with API Gateway
  • Rapidly Changing Data
    • Data that needs to updated frequently might be better served by a storage solution with lower read/write latencies, such as Amazon EBS volumes, RDS, or DynamoDB.
  • File System Requirements
    • Amazon S3 uses a flat namespace and isn’t meant to serve as a standalone, POSIX-compliant file system. However, by using delimiters (commonly the ‘/’ character) you can emulate hierarchical folder structures within a bucket.
    • NOTE: Mountpoint for Amazon S3 provides file system access for read-heavy workloads, but is not a full POSIX file system. For full POSIX compliance, consider Amazon EFS or Amazon FSx.

Performance

  • Access to Amazon S3 from within Amazon EC2 in the same region is fast.
  • Amazon S3 is designed so that server-side latencies are insignificant relative to Internet latencies.
  • Amazon S3 automatically scales to high request rates — your application can achieve at least 3,500 PUT/COPY/POST/DELETE and 5,500 GET/HEAD requests per second per partitioned prefix in a bucket. There are no limits to the number of prefixes in a bucket.
  • If Amazon S3 is accessed using multiple threads, multiple applications, or multiple clients concurrently, total Amazon S3 aggregate throughput will typically scale to rates that far exceed what any single server can generate or consume.
  • S3 Express One Zone provides single-digit millisecond latency and up to 10x faster performance than S3 Standard for latency-sensitive workloads.
  • S3 Transfer Acceleration enables fast, easy, and secure transfers of files over long distances between your client and an S3 bucket using CloudFront’s globally distributed edge locations.

Durability & Availability

  • Amazon S3 storage provides the highest level of data durability and availability, by automatically and synchronously storing your data across a minimum of three Availability Zones within the selected geographical region
  • Amazon S3 is designed to sustain the concurrent loss of data in two facilities, making it very well-suited to serve as the primary data storage for mission-critical data.
  • Amazon S3 is designed for 99.999999999% (11 nines) durability per object and 99.99% availability over a one-year period.
  • Amazon S3 data can be protected from unintended deletions or overwrites using Versioning.
  • Versioning can be enabled with MFA (Multi Factor Authentication) Delete on the bucket, which would require two forms of authentication to delete an object
  • S3 Object Lock provides write-once-read-many (WORM) protection to prevent objects from being deleted or overwritten for a fixed period or indefinitely (Governance or Compliance mode).
  • For Non Critical and Reproducible data, S3 Reduced Redundancy Storage (RRS) was previously available but is no longer recommended. Use S3 One Zone-IA instead for non-critical, reproducible data at lower cost with 99.5% availability.

Cost Model

  • With Amazon S3, you pay only for what you use and there is no minimum fee.
  • Amazon S3 pricing components include: storage (per GB per month, varies by storage class), data transfer out (per GB per month), requests and data retrievals (per n thousand requests per month), and optional management/analytics features.
  • S3 Intelligent-Tiering has a small monthly monitoring and automation charge per object but no retrieval fees, making it ideal for data with unknown or changing access patterns.

Scalability & Elasticity

  • Amazon S3 has been designed to offer a very high level of scalability and elasticity automatically
  • Amazon S3 supports a virtually unlimited number of files in any bucket
  • Amazon S3 bucket can store a virtually unlimited number of bytes
  • Amazon S3 allows you to store any number of objects (files) in a single bucket, and Amazon S3 will automatically manage scaling and distributing redundant copies of your information across multiple AZs in the same region, all using Amazon’s high-performance infrastructure.

Security & Access Management

  • Default Encryption: Since January 5, 2023, all new objects are automatically encrypted with SSE-S3. Options include SSE-S3, SSE-KMS (AWS KMS keys), SSE-C (customer-provided keys), and client-side encryption.
  • SSE-C Disabled by Default: As of April 2026, SSE-C is disabled by default on all new S3 general purpose buckets for improved security.
  • S3 Access Points: Simplify managing data access at scale by creating named access points with distinct permissions and network controls for different applications or teams.
  • S3 Block Public Access: Bucket-level and account-level settings to prevent public access.
  • Bucket Policies & ACLs: Fine-grained access control using IAM policies, bucket policies, and (legacy) Access Control Lists.
  • VPC Endpoints: Access S3 privately from within a VPC without traversing the public internet.

Interfaces

  • Amazon S3 provides standards-based REST APIs for both management and data operations.
  • NOTE – SOAP support over HTTP was deprecated. New Amazon S3 features are not supported for SOAP. Use the REST API or the AWS SDKs.
  • Amazon S3 provides SDKs in multiple languages (Java, Python, .NET, Go, JavaScript/TypeScript, PHP, Ruby, and more) that wrap the underlying APIs
  • AWS CLI provides high-level S3 file commands (ls, cp, mv, sync, etc.) with support for parallel transfers and recursive operations.
  • AWS Management Console provides a web-based interface for managing S3 buckets and objects
  • Mountpoint for Amazon S3 – open-source file client that mounts S3 buckets as local file systems on Linux, optimized for high-throughput read-heavy workloads (GA August 2023).
  • All interfaces provide the ability to store Amazon S3 objects in uniquely-named buckets, with each object identified by a unique Object key within that bucket.

S3 Data Query & Analytics

  • Amazon Athena – Serverless query service to analyze data in S3 using standard SQL without loading data into a database.
  • S3 Tables (Dec 2024) – Fully managed Apache Iceberg tables optimized for analytics, with up to 3x faster query throughput. Supports Intelligent-Tiering and replication.
  • S3 Vectors (GA Dec 2025) – Native vector storage and query for AI embeddings with subsecond performance, up to 2 billion vectors per index.
  • S3 Storage Lens – Cloud storage analytics providing organization-wide visibility into object storage usage, activity, and cost optimization recommendations.
  • S3 Select – Closed to new customers as of July 25, 2024. Use Amazon Athena, S3 Object Lambda, or client-side filtering as alternatives.

Amazon S3 Glacier

⚠️ Standalone Amazon Glacier Vaults – No Longer Available to New Customers

As of December 15, 2025, the original standalone vault-based Amazon Glacier service stopped accepting new customers. Existing customers can continue using it, but no migration is required.

Recommendation: Use the S3 Glacier storage classes (Instant Retrieval, Flexible Retrieval, Deep Archive) which are fully integrated with Amazon S3 and provide the same low-cost archival storage with better management capabilities.

AWS provides a Data Transfer from Amazon S3 Glacier Vaults to Amazon S3 guidance for migrating existing vault data to S3 buckets.

Amazon S3 Glacier storage classes provide extremely low-cost storage for data archival and long-term backup:

  • S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval – Millisecond access for archive data accessed once per quarter. Up to 68% lower cost than S3 Standard-IA. Minimum 90-day storage.
  • S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval (formerly S3 Glacier) – For archive data accessed once or twice per year. Retrieval options:
    • Expedited: 1-5 minutes
    • Standard: 3-5 hours
    • Bulk: 5-12 hours (free)

    Minimum 90-day storage duration.

  • S3 Glacier Deep Archive – Lowest-cost storage for data retained for 7-10+ years. Retrieval options:
    • Standard: Within 12 hours
    • Bulk: Within 48 hours

    Minimum 180-day storage duration.

Ideal Usage Patterns

  • Amazon S3 Glacier classes are ideally suited for long-term archival storage for infrequently accessed data including:
    • Offsite enterprise information archiving
    • Media asset preservation
    • Research and scientific data retention
    • Digital preservation and magnetic tape replacement
    • Regulatory and compliance archives
    • Healthcare records, financial records retention
  • S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval is ideal for data like medical images, news media assets, or user-generated content archives that need millisecond access but are rarely retrieved.

Anti-Patterns

Amazon S3 Glacier storage classes have following Anti-Patterns where they are not an optimal solution

  • Rapidly changing data
    • Data that must be updated very frequently should use a storage solution with lower read/write latencies such as Amazon EBS, DynamoDB, or S3 Standard
  • Real time access (Flexible Retrieval and Deep Archive)
    • Data stored in Glacier Flexible Retrieval or Deep Archive cannot be accessed in real time and requires a restore request with retrieval times from minutes to hours. If immediate access is needed, use S3 Standard, S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval, or S3 Intelligent-Tiering.
  • Short-lived data
    • Glacier classes have minimum storage duration charges (90 days for Instant/Flexible, 180 days for Deep Archive). Data deleted before the minimum is charged for the remainder.

Performance

  • S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval: Millisecond access time, same performance as S3 Standard-IA.
  • S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval: Expedited (1-5 min), Standard (3-5 hours), Bulk (5-12 hours, free).
  • S3 Glacier Deep Archive: Standard (within 12 hours), Bulk (within 48 hours).

Durability and Availability

  • All S3 Glacier storage classes redundantly store data across a minimum of three Availability Zones
  • Designed to provide 99.999999999% (11 nines) durability per object
  • Data is synchronously stored across multiple facilities before returning SUCCESS on upload.
  • Regular, systematic data integrity checks are performed and the system is built to be automatically self-healing.

Cost Model

  • S3 Glacier pricing components include: storage (per GB per month), data transfer out (per GB per month), requests (per thousand requests per month), and data retrievals (per GB retrieved).
  • S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval Bulk retrievals are free.
  • Early deletion charges apply if objects are deleted before the minimum storage duration (90 days for Instant/Flexible, 180 days for Deep Archive).
  • S3 Glacier Deep Archive offers storage starting at approximately $0.00099 per GB per month (lowest cost in the cloud).

Scalability & Elasticity

  • Individual objects can be up to 5 TB in size.
  • There is no limit to the total amount of data stored — Amazon S3 Glacier scales automatically from gigabytes to petabytes.

Interfaces & Lifecycle Integration

  • S3 Glacier storage classes are fully managed through the Amazon S3 APIs and console — objects are transitioned to Glacier classes via S3 Lifecycle policies or direct PUT with storage class specification.
  • S3 Lifecycle policies can automatically transition objects from S3 Standard → S3 Standard-IA → S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval → S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval → S3 Glacier Deep Archive based on age.
  • Restoring objects from Glacier Flexible Retrieval or Deep Archive creates a temporary copy in S3 Standard for a specified retention period; the archived object remains in Glacier.
  • S3 Batch Operations can restore archived objects at scale across millions of objects.
  • Objects in S3 Glacier classes are managed through S3 APIs — they appear in S3 bucket listings and can be managed with standard S3 tools.
  • For data migration into AWS at scale, use the AWS Snow Family (Snowball Edge, Snowcone) for physical data transport. AWS Import/Export (legacy disk-based service) has been replaced by the Snow Family.

AWS Certification Exam Practice Questions

  • Questions are collected from Internet and the answers are marked as per my knowledge and understanding (which might differ with yours).
  • AWS services are updated everyday and both the answers and questions might be outdated soon, so research accordingly.
  • AWS exam questions are not updated to keep up the pace with AWS updates, so even if the underlying feature has changed the question might not be updated
  • Open to further feedback, discussion and correction.
  1. You want to pass queue messages that are 1GB each. How should you achieve this?
    1. Use Kinesis as a buffer stream for message bodies. Store the checkpoint id for the placement in the Kinesis Stream in SQS.
    2. Use the Amazon SQS Extended Client Library for Java and Amazon S3 as a storage mechanism for message bodies. (Amazon SQS messages with Amazon S3 can be useful for storing and retrieving messages with a message size of up to 2 GB. To manage Amazon SQS messages with Amazon S3, use the Amazon SQS Extended Client Library for Java. Refer link)
    3. Use SQS’s support for message partitioning and multi-part uploads on Amazon S3.
    4. Use AWS EFS as a shared pool storage medium. Store filesystem pointers to the files on disk in the SQS message bodies.
  2. Company ABCD has recently launched an online commerce site for bicycles on AWS. They have a “Product” DynamoDB table that stores details for each bicycle, such as, manufacturer, color, price, quantity and size to display in the online store. Due to customer demand, they want to include an image for each bicycle along with the existing details. Which approach below provides the least impact to provisioned throughput on the “Product” table?
    1. Serialize the image and store it in multiple DynamoDB tables
    2. Create an “Images” DynamoDB table to store the Image with a foreign key constraint to the “Product” table
    3. Add an image data type to the “Product” table to store the images in binary format
    4. Store the images in Amazon S3 and add an S3 URL pointer to the “Product” table item for each image
  3. A company has 500 TB of archival data that must be retained for 10 years for regulatory compliance. The data is rarely accessed but must be retrievable within 12 hours when needed. Which S3 storage class is the MOST cost-effective?
    1. S3 Standard-IA
    2. S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval
    3. S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval
    4. S3 Glacier Deep Archive (For data retained 7-10+ years with retrieval within 12 hours, Deep Archive provides the lowest cost at approximately $0.00099/GB/month with Standard retrieval within 12 hours.)
  4. A media company stores user-uploaded photos that are frequently accessed for the first 30 days, occasionally accessed for the next 90 days, and rarely accessed after that. They want to minimize storage costs without operational overhead. Which solution is MOST appropriate?
    1. Store in S3 Standard and create lifecycle rules to transition to S3 Standard-IA after 30 days and S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval after 120 days
    2. Store in S3 Intelligent-Tiering which automatically moves objects between Frequent, Infrequent, and Archive Instant Access tiers based on access patterns (S3 Intelligent-Tiering eliminates operational overhead by automatically optimizing costs based on changing access patterns with no retrieval charges.)
    3. Store in S3 One Zone-IA with lifecycle rules
    4. Store in S3 Standard and manually move objects between storage classes
  5. An organization needs to query CSV data stored in S3 without provisioning any infrastructure. The data is several terabytes and they need to run ad-hoc SQL queries. Which AWS service should they use?
    1. Amazon RDS
    2. Amazon Redshift
    3. Amazon Athena (Amazon Athena is a serverless query service that can run SQL queries directly against data in S3 without loading it into a database. It’s ideal for ad-hoc queries on S3 data.)
    4. S3 Select
  6. A healthcare company needs to store patient records in S3 that cannot be deleted or modified for 7 years due to compliance regulations. Which S3 feature should they use?
    1. S3 Versioning with MFA Delete
    2. S3 Bucket Policy denying delete operations
    3. S3 Object Lock in Compliance mode with a 7-year retention period (S3 Object Lock in Compliance mode provides WORM protection that cannot be overridden by any user, including the root account, ensuring objects cannot be deleted or overwritten for the retention period.)
    4. S3 Glacier Vault Lock
  7. A machine learning team needs to store and query billions of vector embeddings from their AI models with subsecond performance. Which AWS service is purpose-built for this use case?
    1. Amazon OpenSearch Service
    2. Amazon DynamoDB
    3. Amazon S3 with Athena
    4. Amazon S3 Vectors (S3 Vectors provides native vector storage and query capabilities with subsecond performance, supporting up to 2 billion vectors per index, purpose-built for AI embedding workloads at S3’s low cost.)

References