Let's face it. Ever since Bill Gates said, "640 KB should be enough for anybody," our needs for more just keeps growing exponentially. Granted, he was talking about computer memory. Data storage needs is an ever expanding business. No sooner we have bigger drives available and new use case comes around that makes the new storage capacity obsolete in a few months. This is true in the cloud as well. That's why it's important to choose the right storage option. Scaling for storage capacity. S3 is meant to keep pace with your storage needs, but S3 is not a mountable storage that you can attach to your virtual machines. That said, EFS uses S3 as the backend and it allows you to mount it as a drive to your virtual machines. Both of these storage solutions scale with your needs for more storage and both offer intelligent-tiering options, meaning that you can adjust your cost depending on durability and retrieval tiers that match your needs. S3 also offers numerous governance option. So, if your company grows to a point where you need to be compliant with certain regulations, if you start using S3 now, by the time you're forced to comply, you'll be one step ahead. Scaling for performance. If you're more concerned about faster access times instead of storage capacity, EBS volumes may be the right choice for your storage needs.

EBS volumes offer several tiers based on performance, from the cheapest, which is magnetic hard disk drives to the latest top of the line provisioned IO solid-state drives. Performance parameters can be tweaked along the way so it's not super critical to choose the absolute fastest from the start, you can just adjust as your needs grow. AWS instance store or ephemeral storage consists of physical drives attached to the hardware running your EC2 virtual machines. And although, it only serves the temporary purpose, it's really, really fast for those time intensive IO operations that your application may need.