Storage on AWS: a New Course to Learn Everything About Storing Data

A few days ago we launched a brand new course: Storage Fundamentals for AWS that I liked very much and I would like to briefly talk about here. As you might imagine it’s all about the storage solutions available in the Amazon Web Services family. Storage is one of the most used services in the Cloud, isn’t it? S3, the most common storage service in the AWS family, is among the first ever launched, and probably responsible for most of the success that Amazon achieved. Later on, many other S3 features and brand new services were added, and right now the set of solutions for storage in AWS is quite broad and articulated.

It comes to no surprise that storage on the cloud is so broadly used. That’s probably the area where you can best exploit the features of cheapness, and data safety of security, that are typically associated with Cloud. As always though, some experience and knowledge are needed to really master the AWS services, which can be tricky sometimes, especially if you are not completely clear-minded about them.

The course that our Cloud Expert Mohammad Ali Tabibi crafted is a really great overview of all the AWS services related to storage, from S3 up to the less common and used Storage Gateway. After a general introduction to the topic, the first service shown is EBS, the most basic storage service on AWS, which is commonly used in association with EC2 instances to provide permanent storage. The next one is the S3 we already talked about. S3 is a quite different from EBS, especially because it doesn’t provide a file-system, rather it is just object storage to upload any kind of data.

So, the two lectures about S3 will show how the service works internally, the concepts you need to keep in mind to use it proficiently, and how to get started with it and how to take advantage of its many features, including the ones that allow you to host an entire website on it, just like we have shown on another, related course. Then, time for Glacier, the long-term storage service that freezes your infrequently accessed data at a ridiculous 1 cent/GB/month price. It’s one of my favorite services in AWS, and the lecture will teach you how to create a vault and how to backup your most precious data there. Finally, the video concluding this overview is about Storage Gateway, a service that is commonly used to interconnect on-premises infrastructures with AWS services. Not commonly used, but still extremely useful in particular situations.

Storage on AWS is a beginner course, so likely everybody out there will have a chance to enjoy it and grasp at least the most basic concepts shown there. Actually, some experience with the Linux Command Line Interface might be very helpful, especially for the EBS lectures, where Ali will show you how to mount an EBS volume in an EC2 Linux instance. Of course, some general knowledge about EC2, AWS or Cloud Computing will help you better understand the topics that are shown here. No worries, though, we have many AWS courses to help you boost your basic skills. And if after watching this video you want to test your skills about what you just learned, ensure to browse our AWS Quizzes and challenge yourself!

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