May 12, 2020

AWS Simple Icons Explained: The Storage Set

Diagrams for Software Engineering

This is just part of our series explaining and translating AWS Simple Icons. In this entry, we cover another set of icons: Storage.

The AWS storage set is one of several groups of AWS Simple Icons. While AWS icons are free to use (and pre-loaded into Gliffy’s shape library!), mapping each one into something meaningful can be overwhelming. This glossary of the AWS Storage shapes will help.

In the table below, see the most current AWS Simple Icons in the Storage set listed by service category, complete with a brief introduction to the product or service symbolized.

What are AWS Storage Services?
All AWS Storage Icons
Using the Amazon Storage Icons

What are AWS Storage Services?

AWS Storage Services includes multiple products that allow teams to store and share data in a way that meets their needs — everything from data transfer services to block storage. These services have their own icons, as well as additional icons specific to functions within each service.

All AWS Storage Icons

Amazon S3 Icons

Amazon S3		Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) is object storage built to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers with a simple web services interface.
	Bucket	In terms of implementation, buckets are resources. Amazon S3 provides APIs so that you can create and manage these resources (you can also use the Amazon S3 console to perform these operations).
	Bucket with Objects	You can store any number of objects in a bucket.
	Object	An object can be a key, version ID, value, metadata, sub-resource, or access control information.

Amazon EFS Icons

Amazon EFS

Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) provides scalable file storage for use with Amazon EC2. You can create an EFS file system and configure your instances to mount the file system. You can use an EFS file system as a common data source for workloads and applications running on multiple instances.

File System

Amazon EFS provides elastic, shared file storage that is POSIX-compliant. The file system you create supports concurrent read and write access from multiple Amazon EC2 instances and is accessible from all of the Availability Zones in the AWS Region where it was created.

Amazon Glacier Icons

Amazon Glacier

Amazon Glacier is a storage service optimized for infrequently used data, i.e. "cold data." The service provides extremely low-cost durable storage with security features for data archiving and backup.

Archive

An archive is any object (such as a photo, video, or document) that you store in a vault. Each archive has a unique ID and an optional description.

Vault

A vault is a container that stores archives. When you create a vault, you specify a name and a region in which you want the vault.

AWS Storage Gateway Icons

AWS Storage Gateway

AWS Storage Gateway is a service that connects an on-premises software appliance with cloud-based storage to provide a seamless and secure integration between your on-premises IT environment and the AWS storage cloud infrastructure.

Cached
Volume

Cached volume allows you to store your data in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and retain a copy of frequently accessed data subsets locally.

Non-Cached Volume

A volume gateway provides cloud-backed storage volumes that you can mount as Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI) devices from your on-premises application servers.

Virtual Tape Library

AWS Storage Gateway provides a virtual tape library (VTL) for each tape gateway you activate. Initially, the library contains no tapes, but you can create tapes whenever you need to.

AWS Snowball Icons

AWS Snowball*

AWS Snowball is a petabyte-scale data transport solution that uses devices designed to securely transfer large amounts of data in and out of the AWS Cloud.

Import/
Export

The AWS Snowball Management Console is where you'll create and manage jobs to import and export data from Amazon S3.

AWS EBS Icons

Amazon EBS

Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) provides block level storage volumes for use with EC2 instances. EBS volumes are highly available and reliable storage volumes that can be attached to any running instance that is in the same Availability Zone.

Snapshot

You can back up the data on your Amazon EBS volumes to Amazon S3 by taking a point-in-time snapshot. Snapshots are incremental backups, which means only the changed blocks on your device after your most recent snapshot are saved.

Volume

An Amazon EBS volume is a durable, block-level storage device that you can attach to a single EC2 instance. You can use EBS volumes as primary storage for data that requires frequent updates or for throughput-intensive applications that perform continuous disk scans.

Using the Amazon Storage Icons

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