Storage Concepts
Internal
Storage Paradigms
Filesystem Storage
Also referred to as file storage.
Networked Filesystems
Networked filesystems are also known as shared network volumes. They represent one of the infrastructure platform storage primitives. This type of storage can be concurrently mounted on multiple compute instances using standard protocols such as NFS, AFS and SMB/CIFS. Examples: Amazon Elastic File System (EFS).
Block Storage
Block storage is one of the infrastructure platform storage primitives. For cloud platform, block storage is usually dynamically managed through APIs and made available as virtual disk volumes. The block storage volume can be attached to a server or a container instance as if it was a local disk. Examples: Amazon Elastic Block Store (ESB) volumes, Azure Page Blobs, GCP Persistent Disk and OpenStack Cinder.
Block Device
A block device is a storage device that moves data in sequences of bytes or bits (blocks). These devices provide random access to fixes-size blocks of data and generally use buffered I/O. Examples include hard disks, CD-ROM drives, and flash drives. A block device can be physically attached to a computer or accessed remotely as if it were physically attached to the computer.
Object Storage
Object storage is one of the infrastructure platform storage primitives. Object storage blobs are used for immutable, unstructured data such as images, videos and documents. Object storage is usually cheaper and more reliable than block storage, but with higher latency. Examples: Amazon S3 service, Google Cloud Storage service, Azure Blob Storage, OpenStack Swift.