In most cases, the storage cloud services provide is at its core just plain hard drives of one type or another. Cloud technology gives you the ability to use the hard drives inside of a cloud’s physical infrastructure without having to worry which drive your data is saved to or that enough copies of your data are made. The cloud platform takes care of those details for you.
But despite the fancy cloud technology, at the end of the day every bit of data that goes into cloud storage is saved onto some type of physical storage device. Depending on the cloud platform and type of cloud storage you are using, the physical storage device can be a traditional spinning hard drive disk, a newer solid state disk, or even magentic tape in the case of long-term cloud storage services.
Block storage and object storage are perhaps the most common types of cloud storage you will encounter using cloud technology. As the names might suggest, block storage stores data in large blocks, and object storage stores data as individual objects - similar to files in the folders on your computer.
The biggest use cases for block storage usually involve providing the storage for virtual machine instances, cloud computing workloads, or network file storage.\
Many cloud platforms use block storage to provide the operating system partition or data partition for virtual machine instances. When you use block storage, the cloud storage platform allocates a contiguous, whole block of storage called a volume. Storage volumes are as small as a few gigabytes in size and as large as tens or hundreds of gigabytes depending on your need.
Block storage’s functionality is geared towards managing storage that behaves like partitions on physical storage devices. Virtual machines instances and other computing workloads usually see block storage volumes the same as they do partitions on physical storage devices.
Object storage is great for applications that generate small bits of data that are self-contained and have a similar structure as an individual file. Objects are usually kilobytes or a few megabytes in size; however, there are object storage platforms that support uploading objects that are gigabytes in size.
Object storage’s functionality and features are geared towards managing storage that behaves like local files and folders. Users can create buckets in object storage platforms for organizing objects. If objects are like files, buckets are like folders on your local computer.
One of the biggest values to cloud storage is that you can suffer a hardware failure of some kind and not lose any data or have a disruption in your service. The amount of failure you can withstand varies with the type and quality of cloud service you are using. The most advanced, most expensive cloud storage technology can endure the loss of an entire set of data centers in the same geographic region without you losing any data or experiencing a disruption in service. The most basic cloud storage can withstand the loss of a single hard drive disk without losing data, but you may still experience a disruption in service while the cloud storage system recovers from the loss.