SoftNAS can leverage both block storage (such as the varieties of EBS volumes available on AWS) and object storage such as S3. This flexibility is one of the key features of SoftNAS. It can, however, introduce some complexities when determining your requirements. As performance is based not only on the instance size selected but also the storage characteristics, leveraging different types of storage in the same solution will affect your performance.
EBS Volumes
To determine what this effect might be, we must first understand the individual performance characteristics of each storage type. The table below outlines the available block storage options for Amazon Web Services:
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Simple Storage Service (S3)
AWS object storage, known as Simple Storage Service, or S3 has its own characteristics. S3 serves as a repository for Internet data. It provides access to reliable, fast, and inexpensive data storage infrastructure. It is designed to make web-scale computing easy by enabling you to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from within Amazon EC2 or anywhere on the web. Amazon S3 stores data objects redundantly on multiple devices across multiple facilities and allows concurrent read or write access to these data objects by many separate clients or application threads. You can use the redundant data stored in Amazon S3 to recover quickly and reliably from instance or application failures.
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