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What's the Difference Between Amazon EBS and Amazon S3?

Compare Amazon EBS and Amazon S3 side by side — features, pricing, and ideal use cases to help you choose the right product.

Compare side-by-side

Comparisons
Amazon EBS
Amazon S3
Category

Storage, Block Storage

Storage, Object Storage

Description

High-performance block storage at any scale

Virtually unlimited secure object storage for AI, analytics, and archives

Best for
  • Boot volumes
  • Databases
  • Enterprise applications
  • Throughput-intensive workloads
  • Data lakes
  • Backup & restore
  • Static website hosting
  • Archive
  • Big data analytics
Key features
  • SSD & HDD types
  • Snapshots
  • Encryption
  • Multi-attach
  • Elastic Volumes
  • 11 nines durability
  • Storage classes
  • Lifecycle policies
  • Versioning
  • S3 Intelligent-Tiering
Pricing model

Pay per GB provisioned per month + IOPS

Pay per GB stored + requests + data transfer

Free tier

Yes

Yes

Expert take

“Choose gp3 for most general workloads since you get 3,000 IOPS baseline at a lower cost than gp2. For databases needing consistent sub-millisecond latency, io2 Block Express delivers up to 256,000 IOPS with 99.999% durability.”
— Oleksii Bebych, re:Post Top Contributor [profile]

“S3 delivers eleven 9s of durability and scales without limits. It serves as the foundation for data lakes, backup pipelines, and ML training data because you can store anything at any scale and access it from anywhere with fine-grained permissions.”
— Riku Kobayashi, re:Post Top Contributor [profile]

Product page

When to use Amazon EBS or Amazon S3

Use Amazon EBS when:

  • Boot volumes
  • Databases
  • Enterprise applications
  • Throughput-intensive workloads

Learn more about Amazon EBS »

Use Amazon S3 when:

  • Data lakes
  • Backup & restore
  • Static website hosting
  • Archive
  • Big data analytics

Learn more about Amazon S3 »

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