Alibaba Cloud and AWS Comparative Study 3 - Storage Product Comparison

Alibaba Cloud and AWS Comparative Study 3 - Object Storage Product Comparison aws vs alibaba cloud pricing

​ The so-called "traditional business" of cloud computing is actually storage and computing. Generally speaking, these two parts are the basic components of the entire cloud computing service, and many other derived services need to be based on the content of the two parts of storage and computing. The most essential functions of computer technology are computing and storage aws vs alibaba cloud pricing.

Cloud Storage S3 and Ali OSS

The object storage of cloud storage services is the most important part of storage services. Of course, there are also manufacturers specializing in this single service, such as Qiniu Cloud Storage. The services of S3 and Alibaba's OSS are basically the same and correspond one-to-one, with only minor differences aws vs alibaba cloud pricing.

The use of object storage also involves storage lifecycle management. We know that data is usually divided into master data (metadata) and business data in general enterprise information systems. Usually the master data does not change frequently, the main parameters of the equipment, the product BOM composition of the factory and so on. Business data is data that is generated every day or even every moment, such as orders, real-time telemetry data of the Internet of Things, etc. Typically, master data is used more frequently and requires high availability. And usually master data is stored in relational database in the form of structured data. Correspondingly, the timeliness of business data is relatively strong. The value of the data decreases over time. Therefore, it is necessary for us to transfer data that has not been accessed for a long time to a storage service with a relatively low unit storage cost. For object storage, it is usually necessary to perform tiered storage for the frequency and time of data access according to the period to reduce costs. Data that is frequently accessed and used is stored in standard object storage services as hot data, while cold data that is backed up and archived is stored in cheaper archive storage solutions aws vs alibaba cloud pricing.

The S3 object storage that AWS can provide mainly includes the following:


​ We see that AWS provides different storage methods for different types of data. It can provide users with object storage modes for different needs. Among them, S3 Glacier is mainly used for data backup and archiving, and is used to store cold data. Among them, S3 Glacier is general cold data, and the access time usually disappears in a few minutes to several times, mainly depending on whether the data read is expedited and the size of the data volume. S3 Glacier Deep Archive is mainly used to replace traditional tape storage devices for long-term archiving aws vs alibaba cloud pricing.

S3 Standard is the most versatile object storage service. Offers standard access performance and charges only for storage capacity, not data access.

​ S3 Intelligent Tiering provides a simple tiered storage method for data, and will automatically adjust and store frequently accessed and infrequently accessed data into two different storage tiers, the frequent access tier and the infrequent access tier. If a file has not been accessed for 30 days, the file will be relegated to the non-trivial access tier, a storage tier that is much less expensive. The additional cost of adopting S3 Intelligent Tiering relative to standard S3 storage is storage monitoring fees. However, in the case of a large number of infrequently accessed objects in all files, a lot of cost can be saved

​ S3 Standard-IA This service can provide the same data access performance and reliability as S3 Standard service, but the storage price is much lower than S3 Standard. However, if you read data, you will be charged according to the amount of data read. This service is very suitable for scenarios that are frequently written but read less, such as data backup, system snapshots, etc.

​ Usually, in order to ensure its performance and availability, S3 storage will replicate 3 and store them in >=3 different availability zones AZ. Of course, there are also types of S3 One Zone-IA that will only be stored in one AZ. This storage method mainly requires low data security and availability, and is expected to be adopted in the case of low storage costs.

Types of OSS services provided by Alibaba Cloud:


OSS service comparison

It can be seen that Alibaba Cloud's cloud storage service types are relatively simple, including standard type, low-frequency access type, archive type, and cold archive type. We can find that Alibaba Cloud does not have a product corresponding to S3 Intelligent Tiering. S3 Standard-IA corresponds to the Alibaba Cloud low-frequency access type. Archive storage corresponds to S3 Glacier. AWS provides 3 AZ support by default; Alibaba Cloud defaults to a single AZ, and multiple AZs in the same city need to be charged separately. Overall, in terms of object storage services, there is still a certain gap between Alibaba Cloud's service products and AWS in terms of flexibility.

​ In terms of price, the S3 standard service is $0.023 per GB, and Alibaba Cloud is divided into single-AZ and multi-AZ. Since S3 has more AZs by default, the target should be 0.15 yuan, and the price is basically the same. S3's archive type is $0.004 per GB, and Alibaba Cloud's 0.033 yuan is more expensive, and considering that Alibaba Cloud's archive type does not have much support for zone redundancy, there is no cost-effectiveness advantage. However, in China, Alibaba Cloud's service coverage is relatively wide, and many data centers are a very big advantage.

​ In terms of the availability and data durability of official propaganda, Alibaba Cloud data is 99.9999999999% (12 9s) of data durability and 99.995% of data availability; while AWS is nominally 11 9s of data durability and 99.9% Data availability. However, this is difficult to verify. Both AWS and Alibaba Cloud have experienced major large-scale service interruption accidents in recent years.

Offline data migration service

AWS provides two solutions for special edge environments and large data volume migration, SnowCone, SnowBall and Snow Mobile. SnowCone comes with its own power supply and can be used in extreme environments; SnowBall supports relatively powerful offline edge computing and storage capabilities, and provides offline compatible S3 and EC2 services; Snow Mobile is a large-scale offline data migration solution at the data center level, using large trucks It can store and migrate 100PB of massive data at one time.


Alibaba Cloud provides Lightning Cube, which mainly provides offline migration of storage. It is not an offline OSS service and requires users to perform more configuration and operations.

Other additional services

Alibaba Cloud provides the intelligent media management IMM function, which can process, identify and classify images stored in OSS. But need to buy separately. This function provides great convenience for commonly used object storage applications such as image beds.

in conclusion

This article only compares AWS S3 services and Alibaba Cloud OSS services in terms of functions. In general, although Alibaba Cloud is a leading company in the domestic cloud computing field, there is still a certain gap in flexibility and comprehensiveness with AWS products. The performance and stability of the service have not been tested and will not comment for the time being.