Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) vs. Amazon S3 Glacier

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) from AWS is designed for application workloads that benefit from fine tuning for performance, cost and capacity. Typical use cases include Big Data analytics engines (like the Hadoop/HDFS ecosystem and Amazon EMR clusters), relational and NoSQL databases (like Microsoft SQL Server and MySQL or Cassandra and MongoDB), stream and log processing applications (like Kafka and Splunk), and data warehousing applications (like Vertica and Teradata).N/A
Amazon S3 Glacier
Score 9.2 out of 10
N/A
The Amazon S3 Glacier storage classes are purpose-built for data archiving, providing a low cost archive storage in the cloud. According to AWS, S3 Glacier storage classes provide virtually unlimited scalability and are designed for 99.999999999% (11 nines) of data durability, and they provide fast access to archive data and low cost.
$0
Per GB Per Month
Pricing
Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)Amazon S3 Glacier
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Bulk Retrieval Pricing
$0.0025
Per GB Per Month
Storage Pricing
$0.004
Per GB Per Month
Retrieval Pricing
$0.01
Per GB Per Month
Expedited Retrieval Pricing
$0.03
Per GB Per Month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)Amazon S3 Glacier
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)Amazon S3 Glacier
Top Pros
Top Cons
Best Alternatives
Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)Amazon S3 Glacier
Small Businesses
Akamai Cloud Computing
Akamai Cloud Computing
Score 9.0 out of 10
Barracuda Essentials
Barracuda Essentials
Score 9.2 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Pure Storage FlashArray
Pure Storage FlashArray
Score 9.3 out of 10
Barracuda Essentials
Barracuda Essentials
Score 9.2 out of 10
Enterprises
Pure Storage FlashArray
Pure Storage FlashArray
Score 9.3 out of 10
Microsoft Exchange
Microsoft Exchange
Score 8.6 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)Amazon S3 Glacier
Likelihood to Recommend
9.1
(20 ratings)
8.0
(7 ratings)
Usability
8.0
(1 ratings)
6.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
8.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)Amazon S3 Glacier
Likelihood to Recommend
Amazon AWS
It provides the optimized storage performance and cost for your workload and these options really work with SSD-backed storage and it improves the database performance. Keeping backups of your EC2 resources, including EBS volumes is a little bit tricky and its takes some more time and increase through put is also a tiring job to do.
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Amazon AWS
If your organization has a lot of archival data that it needs to be backed up for safekeeping, where it won't be touched except in a dire emergency, Amazon Glacier is perfect. In our case, we had a client that generates many TB of video and photo data at annual events and wanted to retain ALL of it, pre- and post- edit for potential use in a future museum. Using the Snowball device, we were able to move hundreds of TB of existing media data that was previously housed on multiple Thunderbolt drives, external RAIDs, etc, in an organized manner, to Amazon Glacier. Then, we were able to setup CloudBerry Backup on their production computers to continually backup any new media that they generated during their annual events.
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Pros
Amazon AWS
  • Raw storage capacity attached to your instance operative system
  • Frequent data rewriting (mission critical for reporting)
  • Low latency connectivity (14 reporting subsidiaries in different time zones)
  • Videly spreaded for implementation
  • Fast accessible drive
  • Block storage are core for Java, Net mobile applications
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Amazon AWS
  • Cheap storage of backup data.
  • Can be used as a part of the entire suite of tools from Amazon, without requiring you to leave the familiar stack.
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Cons
Amazon AWS
  • Creating too much EBS can be disaster if you are not properly organized by tags
  • In terms of pricing it's a bit on higher side.
  • In terms of performance, there is room for improvement as sometimes reading or saving the data can be painful.
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Amazon AWS
  • Accessing data stored in Glacier is slow. That shouldn't be a surprise, but it is undesirable nonetheless.
  • Retrieving a large amount of data can be expensive; Glacier's intended use is as an archive of rarely-accessed data.
  • Some users regard Glacier with fear and uncertainty. Slow retrieval time and high retrieval cost are the greatest risks of using Glacier, and they are also the Glacier interaction that most users have the least experience with.
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Usability
Amazon AWS
Amazon EBS is a great tool and fairly easy to use as long as you are familiar with the Amazon Web Service ecosystem. It allows a great way for you to move storage around easily and allows you to quickly provision storage as needed based on the business requirement. For us, it's easy to move between our EC2 images that had been linked with EBS storage between these Amazon accounts.
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Amazon AWS
It is difficult to delete the data as you have to wait for inventory and then bucket modification has to expire.
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Support Rating
Amazon AWS
The support for Amazon Elastic Block Store is great as long as you can articulate your needs. Like most tools, there may be some back and forth before you find a support person that is knowledgable in the tool and can provide you with necessary insights.
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Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Amazon AWS
So far I have only used Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) and Azure but comparatively [I] prefer AWS elastic Block store as its having more advantages than Azure and I found it quite satisfactory and it helped a lot for information storage. We are not looking for any other hosting provider at this time.
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Amazon AWS
Since the rest of our infrastructure is in Amazon AWS, coding for sending data to Glacier just makes sense. The others are great as well, for their specific needs and uses, but having *another* third-party software to manage, be billed for, and learn/utilize can be costly in money and time.
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Return on Investment
Amazon AWS
  • When your application needs high IOPS storage, this is a great solution that will keep your business functioning.
  • Without Amazon Elastic Block Store you could try spreading your data across several standard drives, but that introduces complexity and still has IOPS limits.
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Amazon AWS
  • Helped us meet compliance requirements while minimizing costs.
  • Simple integration with almost no changes required to our existing S3 management policies.
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