Hybrid Cloud

• Part of your infrastructure is on the cloud

• Part of your infrastructure is on-premises

• This can be due to

  • Long cloud migrations

  • Security requirements

  • Compliance requirements

  • IT strategy

• S3 is a proprietary storage technology (unlike EFS / NFS), so how do you expose the S3 data on-premises: Storage Gateway

Storage Gateway

• Bridge between on-premises data and cloud data (s3)

• Not suitable for one-time sync of large amounts of data (use DataSync instead)

• Optimizes data transfer by sending only changed data

• Use cases:

  • disaster recovery

  • backup & restore

  • tiered storage

  • on-premises cache & low-latency files access

Types of Storage Gateway

S3 File Gateway

• Used to expand on-premise NFS by leveraging S3 using the NFS and SMB protocol

• Configured S3 buckets are accessible on premises using the NFS and SMB protocol

• Most recently used data is cached at the file gateway for low latency access

• Integrated with Active Directory (AD) for user authentication

• Supports S3 Standard, S3 Standard IA, S3 One Zone A, S3 Intelligent Tiering

• Transition to S3 Glacier using a Lifecycle Policy

• Bucket access using IAM roles for each File Gateway

  

FSx File Gateway

• Used to expand on-premise Windows-based storage by leveraging FSx for Windows

• Windows native compatibility (SMB, NTFS, Active Directory)

• Local cache for frequently accessed data

• Useful for group file shares and home directories

  

Volume Gateway

• Used for on-premise storage volumes

• Uses iSCSI protocol

• Backed by EBS snapshots which can help restore on-premises volumes

• Two kinds of volumes:

  • Cached volumes: storage extension using S3 with caching at the volume gateway

  • Stored volumes: entire dataset is on premise, scheduled backups to S3 as EBS snapshots

Tape Gateway

• Used to backup on-premises data using tape-based process to S3 as Virtual Tapes

• Uses iSCSI protocol

• • Virtual Tape Library (VTL) backed by Amazon S3 and Glacier

  

Hardware appliance

• Storage Gateway requires on-premises virtualization. If you don’t have virtualization available, you can use a Storage Gateway - Hardware Appliance. It is a mini server that you need to install on-premises.

• Does not work with FSx File Gatway