AWS provides a rich portfolio of storage and database services, each designed for specific access patterns and workloads. Amazon Simple Storage Service, or S3, is the foundational object storage service. It is built to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere on the web, offering eleven nines of durability and virtually unlimited scalability. S3 supports features such as versioning, which keeps multiple variants of an object in the same bucket, and lifecycle policies that automatically transition objects to cheaper storage classes or expire them after a defined period.
S3 offers several storage classes that allow customers to balance cost against access frequency. S3 Standard is designed for frequently accessed data, while S3 Intelligent-Tiering automatically moves objects between tiers based on changing access patterns. For long-term archives, services such as S3 Glacier provide very low-cost storage with retrieval times ranging from minutes to hours. One Zone-IA is a lower-cost option for infrequently accessed data that does not require the multi-AZ resilience of other classes. For block-level storage that attaches directly to EC2 instances, Amazon Elastic Block Store, or EBS, provides persistent, high-performance volumes with snapshot capabilities for backup and recovery. For shared file storage, Amazon Elastic File System, or EFS, delivers a scalable NFS file system that can be mounted by multiple EC2 instances across multiple Availability Zones.
On the database side, AWS offers both relational and non-relational managed services. Amazon Relational Database Service, or RDS, supports popular engines such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server. RDS automates routine tasks like backups, patching, and failover, and Multi-AZ deployments provide high availability by replicating data synchronously to a standby instance in another Availability Zone. For applications that need a non-relational model, Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed NoSQL database that delivers single-digit millisecond latency at any scale. DynamoDB includes features such as global tables for multi-region replication and automatic scaling of throughput capacity. To accelerate read-heavy workloads, Amazon ElastiCache provides in-memory caching using Redis or Memcached engines, offloading traffic from primary databases and reducing overall latency.