Storage Gateway Overview – AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner

🌉 AWS Storage Gateway — Simplified

Many organizations run a hybrid cloud — part on-premises, part AWS. Storage Gateway is the bridge connecting the two.

💡 Exam Tip: AWS Storage Gateway connects on-premises storage with AWS cloud storage — that's the one-liner to remember.

🌐 What's a Hybrid Cloud?

An environment where part of your infrastructure stays on-premises while the rest runs in AWS — rather than migrating everything at once, you keep what you have and adopt AWS gradually.

Why go hybrid?

🏢 Already have an on-prem data center
🚚 Mid-migration to AWS
🔒 Compliance requires certain workloads to stay local
📋 Business strategy calls for a mixed approach

📦 AWS Storage Options

Before seeing why Storage Gateway is needed, know the three storage shapes AWS offers:

Type	Used For	Examples
💾 Block	VM storage	EBS, EC2 Instance Store
📁 File	Shared file systems	Amazon EFS
🪣 Object	Images, videos, backups, docs	S3, S3 Glacier

🪣 Why Can't On-Prem Just Access S3 Directly?

S3 is object storage built on its own AWS APIs — unlike NFS or EFS, it isn't designed to be mounted as a standard network file system by local servers. That gap is exactly what Storage Gateway closes.

🔗 What Storage Gateway Does

It sits between your on-prem environment and AWS storage services, letting local applications read/write data that's seamlessly synced to the cloud — with little to no change to your existing systems. Under the hood, it taps into:

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🪣 Amazon S3
💾 Amazon EBS
🧊 S3 Glacier

🎯 Common use cases

💾 Backup & Restore
🚨 Disaster Recovery
📦 Tiered Storage
🌐 Hybrid Cloud Storage

📂 Types of Storage Gateway

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📁 File Gateway
💽 Volume Gateway
📼 Tape Gateway

💡 Cloud Practitioner Note: No need to distinguish between these for the exam — just know Storage Gateway links on-prem storage to AWS cloud storage.

✅ Takeaway

Storage Gateway lets you keep your existing on-prem setup while tapping into AWS storage (S3, EBS, Glacier) behind the scenes — the bridge that makes hybrid cloud work without ripping out what you already have.