Cloud-Based Block Storage

In the simplest sense, a block of data storage is a fixed-sized sequence of bits. The size of the block normally corresponds to an underlying unit of storage on the block device. Some applications work with very large blocks of data, the format of which has meaning only to the application itself—meaning that the data may not map well to storage within a file system or database. To support applications with large data-block needs, AWS, for example, provides the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), a highly reliable, scalable, and available block-storage solution. Amazon S3 describes the blocks of storage as buckets. Because applications must manage the data and its organization, developers often refer to block storage as software-defined storage.