Storage Services Use Cases and Best Practices in Azure and AWS [Part 1]

Azure AWS

1. Azure Disk Storage / AWS Elastic Block Store(EBS)

  • Hosting operating system disks for virtual machines.
  • Hosting databases, application servers, and transactional workloads.
  • Providing persistent storage for Kubernetes clusters.
  • Providing storage for boot volumes and data volumes.
  • Supporting high-performance requirements with Provisioned IOPS SSD volumes.
  • Best practices for optimizing performance, resilience, and cost-efficiency.

2. Azure Files / Amazon Elastic File System (EFS)

  • Providing shared file storage for applications, development environments, and multiple EC2 instances.
  • Hosting user profiles and home directories in virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) environments.
  • Migrating on-premises file shares to the cloud.
  • Supporting containerized applications with persistent storage.

3. Azure Blob Storage / Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3):

  • Storing and serving static website content.
  • Hosting media files, backups, and archives.
  • Implementing data lakes and analytics solutions.
  • Strategies for optimizing performance, scalability, and cost efficiency.

4. Azure Backup / AWS Backup

  • Protecting virtual machines / EC2 instances, databases / RDS databases,  DynamoDB tables, files / EFS file system.
  • Implementing data retention policies and disaster recovery solutions.
  • Ensuring compliance with data retention policies.
  • Ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements and industry standards.
  • Best practices for configuring backup plans, monitoring backup jobs, and managing backups at scale.

5. Azure Archive Storage / Amazon S3 Glacier:

  • Archiving rarely accessed data for long-term retention and compliance.
  • Storing regulatory data, audit logs, financial records, backup archives, and historical records.
  • Implementing cold storage solutions for data backup, disaster recovery, and archival data.
  • Considerations for data retrieval, compliance, cost optimization, and data lifecycle management.

The next article aims to guide on selecting the most suitable storage service for different use cases in Azure and AWS, helping readers make informed decisions and optimize their cloud storage strategies.