Item: AWS Storage Gateway
Rating: 8
Author: Joe Hughes

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

AWS Storage Gateway is currently being used across the whole organization. It solves our backup requirements as well as some logging requirements we need. We just log, ship, and auto backup using it. Initial configurations were a bit tricky; however, this more complete solution did turn out to be more palatable rather than performing more maintenance.

Pros and Cons

It is good for "forever" solutions for backing up data.
It is good for S3 attachments to traditional servers.
It is relatively easy to manage, once configured.

It is fairly difficult to get initially configured (as with most things AWS).
It is not always speedy.
Relative location becomes important for speed of consistent usage.

Return on Investment

It has positively affected us for ETL on reports to customers that neither party wants to pay too much for.
It has also positively affected us where our backup systems where old and had large maintenance costs.
It has some new, net negative impact with slowed down delivery or random slowing incidents.

Alternatives Considered

Red Hat Ceph Storage

We tried Red Hat Ceph Storage since we are a Centos/RHEL shop and there is a lot of engineering expertise on hand to manage it with configuration management tools and automation in place. What we discovered (rather quickly) was that the speed was difficult to bump up into nominal levels for attached disks, the network pipes' size did not matter, and there was an issue with logical disk management that would have added an extra layer of complexity to the whole inception of the product. We would have had to manage a backup of the system to our own buckets on top of implementing the tool.

Key Insights

Do you think AWS Storage Gateway delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with AWS Storage Gateway's feature set?

Yes

Did AWS Storage Gateway live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of AWS Storage Gateway go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy AWS Storage Gateway again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Jira Software, PagerDuty, Looker, Apache Hadoop, Vertica, Apache Kafka, Redis

Likelihood to Recommend

If you have a relatively large infrastructure in place and are consistently backing up servers for legal or compliance reasons, this is a good solution. Also, this fits where you may store logs for review in a point-in-time type of ecological view of your infrastructure. Finally, if you have a large reporting delivery (ETL), this is very handy as well as a quick shortcut for delivery of locally generated reports from the servers.

AWS Storage Gateway can help out infrastructures, particularly backups

Overall Satisfaction with AWS Storage Gateway