How to choose a storage product
Alibaba Gov Cloud offers three main categories of storage products: block storage, object storage, and file storage. This topic describes the differences between them to help you choose the right product for your business. Selecting the right product from the start helps prevent future problems with usage, purchasing, and cost management.
Comparison of storage products
| Comparison item | Block Storage | Object Storage Service | File Storage |
| I/O characteristics | Random read/write | Append and random read | Random read/write |
| Application access API | POSIX-based APIs | SDK, RESTful | POSIX-based APIs |
| Number of concurrent clients | Dozens | Thousands | Thousands |
| Capacity | GB to 12 TB | GB to PB | GB to PB |
| Throughput | GB/s | Tens of GB/s | Tens of GB/s |
| IOPS (4 KB random) | Millions | Thousands | 100,000 |
| Access latency | Hundreds of μs | Tens of ms | Millisecond-level |
| File-level authorization | Not supported | Supported | Supported |
- Elastic Block Storage
Elastic Block Storage provides low latency and high IOPS, making it ideal for high-performance I/O scenarios such as databases.
Purchase link: https://ecs-buy.aliyun.com/disk#/cloudDisk/cn-north-2-gov-1
- Object Storage Service (OSS)
Its high scalability and throughput make it ideal for image, audio, and video processing scenarios.
Purchase link: https://www.aliyun.com/product/oss
- File Storage (NAS)
It offers significant advantages in throughput and data sharing, making it ideal for high-performance computing (HPC) and data sharing scenarios.
Purchase link: https://www.aliyun.com/product/nas
Customer use cases
