AWS Storage Gateway is a hybrid cloud storage that enables low latency access to on-premises clients and applications using industry standard storage protocols like NFS, SMB and iSCSI. AWS Storage Gateway offers three types of Gateways – File Gateway, Volume Gateway and Tape Gateway. In this post, I will provide the differences between File Gateway and Volume Gateway.
| AWS File Gateway | AWS Volume Gateway |
| AWS File Gateway provides access to Amazon S3 Storage using file level protocols NFS and SMB. | AWS Volume Gateway provides access to Amazon S3 storage using block level protocol iSCSI, in two modes, cached and stored. |
| In addition to NFS and SMB, you can access your files as objects through S3 bucket directly using S3 API. | You cannot access your files through S3 API directly. You can access only through iSCSI using Volume Gateway or through EBS volume using EBS snapshots. |
| You need only cache disk for local storage, minimum VM disk is 1. | You need both upload buffer and cache disk for local storage, minimum VM disks are 2. |
| You can take backups by enabling S3 versioning on the S3 bucket. You can use S3 lifecycle policies to maintain versions. | You can take backups using EBS snapshots which are stored in S3. You can use AWS Backup to schedule and maintain backups. |
| Maximum file shares for a file gateway are 10. | Maximum volumes for a volume gateway are 32. |
| Using S3, you can have virtually unlimited storage for the file share size. | Maximum volume size for cached volume gateway is 32 TiB, stored volume gateway is 16 TiB. |
References:
https://aws.amazon.com/storagegateway/faqs/
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/storagegateway/latest/vgw/StorageGatewayConcepts.html
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/filegateway/latest/files3/what-is-file-s3.html