AWS Storage Gateway is a software appliance that allows us to seamlessly connect our on-premises environment with AWS cloud-based storage backends. The Storage Gateway appliance can be run as a virtual machine in our on-premises data center and is able to deliver file-based storage, data volumes, and a virtual tape library device backed by Amazon S3 and Glacier backends.

The following configuration options are available with AWS Storage Gateway:

• File Gateway: A network filesystem service that allows you to access files on S3 via standard NFSv3, NFSv4.1, SMB 2, and SMB 3 protocols. The File Gateway is able to cache read and write requests on the locally deployed VM and deliver low latency responses to clients accessing the file server. In the backend, data is always stored on S3 so we can perform the typical S3 functions discussed in Chapter 7, Understanding Simple Storage Service and Glacier, such as server-side encryption, life cycling, and replicating the S3 bucket to another region for higher resiliency.
• Volume Gateway: A service that allows us to mount block-level volumes via the standard iSCSI protocol from the Storage Gateway device. The volumes created on the Storage Gateway are always backed by an S3 datastore; thus, we get the benefits of both worlds: block-level access and high durability and availability. The Storage Gateway appliance can cache the local volume in two different ways:
  • Locally Cached Volumes: Data is served from S3 and only caches frequently read data and buffers writes on the local Storage Gateway, thus enabling low latency and high performance to be achieved inside our on-premises environment. 
  • Locally Stored Volumes: All data is served from the local volume and regular snapshots are taken of the local volume. The snapshots are asynchronously backed up to S3, thus giving us the ability to restore the data in case of a local Storage Gateway volume failure or data corruption.
• Tape Gateway: A service that presents a virtual tape library that can be used with our traditional on-premises backup solutions. The data is always delivered straight into Glacier, giving us the benefit of very low cost storage and very high durability of our archiving solution. The Tape Gateway can be used to replace existing tape libraries without the need for re-architecting the backup solution.