AWS is increasingly supporting hybrid cloud architectures, where part of an organization’s infrastructure remains on-premises, and part of it is migrated to AWS. This approach can be beneficial for gradual cloud migration, compliance requirements, or hybrid workload strategies.
To connect on-premises storage with AWS cloud storage, AWS provides Storage Gateway, a service that acts as a bridge between the two environments.
AWS Storage Gateway enables businesses to:
✅ Extend on-premises storage to AWS for backup, disaster recovery, and migration.
✅ Use AWS cloud storage with low-latency on-premises access via caching.
✅ Bridge legacy storage solutions (like tape backups) to cloud-based Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier.
AWS offers four types of Storage Gateways, each serving different hybrid cloud use cases:
| Storage Gateway Type | Primary Use Case | Storage Backend |
|---|---|---|
| S3 File Gateway | On-premises access to S3 object storage using file protocols | Amazon S3 |
| FSx File Gateway | On-premises access to FSx for Windows File Server with caching | Amazon FSx |
| Volume Gateway | Backup and restore on-premises block storage to AWS | Amazon S3 (EBS Snapshots) |
| Tape Gateway | Migrate and store tape-based backups in AWS | Amazon S3 & Glacier |
Purpose: Provides on-premises access to an Amazon S3 bucket via NFS or SMB protocols, making S3 function like a local file system.
🔹 How It Works: