AWS FSx vs S3 File Gateway

Question

let's suppose I have the need to have a NAS-equivalent share on AWS that will replace my on-prem NAS server. I see that both solutions, FSx and S3 File Gateway, allow to have a SMB protocol interface. So they will present themselves to clients in the same way. Costs would be much smaller using Storage Gateway backed by S3 for large volumes, if slower performance are acceptable. Is this the only difference?

What are the differences, from a practical perspective, to use one solution over the other?

I'm not mentioning the specific use case on purpose, just want to keep the discussion at a general level.

Thanks, Regards.

Answer 1

FSx is file system service and S3 is objects storage. File Gateway can "trick" your OS to "think" that S3 is a file system, but it isn't.

Try creating s3 bucket & FSx file system, options are very different. If you use it through file gateway, i would look mostly into what happens with data post upload to aws, what will you do next. If it's just a backup and you want to have unlimited space.network disk drive attached to your device, i would pick s3.

In s3 you pick storage classes and not worry about capacity, in Fsx you do worry about those things, you pick SSD/HDD, you set capacity, which minimum could be 32Gb, so you over provision by nature of tech. You also have ceilings of how much data you can put into file system device (65536 GiB). I would pick S3 always except when you have some specific requirements for not picking S3 to store data while it has perfect lifecycle, storage class, versioning, security built in and it's true cloud serverless service with all the peace of mind that it just works and you don't run to traditional issues like out of disk space.