How to choose between NAS, OSS, and EBS
This topic describes the differences between File Storage NAS, Object Storage Service, and Elastic Block Storage. This topic also describes their deployment architectures to help you select the most suitable Alibaba Cloud storage service.
Comparison table
The following table compares the main differences between File Storage NAS, Object Storage Service, and Elastic Block Storage.
Comparison Item | File Storage NAS | Object Storage Service | Elastic Block Storage |
Features | Access NAS directly from applications that use a local file system, with no modifications needed. NAS provides high throughput and high input/output operations per second (IOPS), and supports random read/write operations and online file modifications. | OSS is accessible over the public network. It provides a low-cost, large-scale shared storage space. It is suitable for data that is seldom modified after being written. | EBS provides block-level storage that supports random read and write operations. It is similar to a physical hard disk. You can partition and format an EBS device and create a file system on it. |
Scenarios | Mainly used for data storage in scientific computing, container data persistence, and online enterprise production applications. Examples include AI computing, gene computing, pharmaceutical computing, shared persistent volumes (PVs) for containers, log data persistence, CI/CD platforms, and data file sharing for Cloud Desktops. | Mainly used for data storage in internet applications developed with object-based APIs. Examples include audio and video storage for internet services, data lakes, cloud photo albums, and personal or enterprise cloud drive applications. | Suitable for I/O-intensive, high-performance, and low-latency scenarios, such as online transactional processing (OLTP) databases and NoSQL databases. |
Access mode | Thousands of Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instances or tens of thousands of containers can concurrently read the same file and perform random read and write operations using Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX)-based APIs. | Millions of clients can concurrently read the same file and perform append-write operations using software development kits (SDKs) and RESTful APIs. | EBS provides raw block devices. After you attach an EBS device to an ECS instance, you must format the device and create a file system, such as ext3, ext4, or NTFS, before applications can access it. If up to 16 ECS instances need to access the same disk concurrently, you must use a cluster file system to ensure data synchronization between the instances. Examples of cluster file systems include Oracle Cluster File System version 2 (OCFS2), Global File System 2 (GFS2), Veritas Cluster File System (Veritas CFS), Oracle Automatic Storage Management Cluster File System (Oracle ACFS), and Databricks File System (DBFS). For more information, see Multi-attach for disks. |
Minimum latency |
| Tens of milliseconds | Microseconds |
Maximum throughput per instance | 20 GB/s | 2 to 100 Gbit/s The maximum upload and download throughput for a single Alibaba Cloud account varies by region. For more information, see Limits and performance metrics. | Several GB/s |
Capacity | GiB to PiB | Unlimited | GiB to TiB |
File-level authorization | Support | Support | Not supported |
Data storage method | Hierarchical directory structure | Flat file structure | Data must be split into arbitrarily divided volumes of the same size. |
Protocol | NFS and SMB | HTTP/HTTPS | Standard virtual block device interface protocols or Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) interface protocols |
Deployment architecture
The following figure shows the deployment architecture for applications that use File Storage NAS, Object Storage Service, and Elastic Block Storage.
Related documents
File Storage NAS provides two storage classes: General-purpose NAS and Extreme NAS. For more information, see Storage Classes. For more information about how to select a file system based on your workload, see Selection guide.
For more information about NAS billing, see Billing overview.