# SUS04-BP02 Use technologies that support data access and storage patterns
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 Use storage technologies that best support how your data is accessed and stored to minimize the resources provisioned while supporting your workload. 

 **Common anti-patterns:** 
+  You assume that all workloads have similar data storage and access patterns. 
+  You only use one tier of storage, assuming all workloads fit within that tier. 
+  You assume that data access patterns will stay consistent over time. 

 **Benefits of establishing this best practice:** Selecting and optimizing your storage technologies based on data access and storage patterns will help you reduce the required cloud resources to meet your business needs and improve the overall efficiency of cloud workload. 

 **Level of risk exposed if this best practice is not established:** Low 

## Implementation guidance
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 Select the storage solution that aligns best to your access patterns, or consider changing your access patterns to align with the storage solution to maximize performance efficiency. 

### Implementation steps
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+  Evaluate your data characteristics and access pattern to collect the key characteristics of your storage needs. Key characteristics to consider include: 
  +  **Data type:** structured, semi-structured, unstructured 
  +  **Data growth:** bounded, unbounded 
  +  **Data durability:** persistent, ephemeral, transient 
  +  **Access patterns:** reads or writes, frequency, spiky, or consistent 
+  Migrate data to the appropriate storage technology that supports your data characteristics and access pattern. Here are some examples of AWS storage technologies and their key characteristics:     
[\[See the AWS documentation website for more details\]](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/2023-10-03/framework/sus_sus_data_a3.html)
+  For storage systems that are a fixed size, such as Amazon EBS or Amazon FSx, monitor the available storage space and automate storage allocation on reaching a threshold. You can leverage Amazon CloudWatch to collect and analyze different metrics for [Amazon EBS](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/using_cloudwatch_ebs.html) and [Amazon FSx](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/fsx/latest/WindowsGuide/monitoring-cloudwatch.html). 
+  Amazon S3 Storage Classes can be configured at the object level and a single bucket can contain objects stored across all of the storage classes. 
+  You can also use Amazon S3 Lifecycle policies to automatically transition objects between storage classes or remove data without any application changes. In general, you have to make a trade-off between resource efficiency, access latency, and reliability when considering these storage mechanisms. 

## Resources
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 **Related documents:** 
+  [Amazon EBS volume types](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ebs-volume-types.html) 
+  [Amazon EC2 instance store](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/InstanceStorage.html) 
+  [Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/intelligent-tiering.html) 
+ [ Amazon EBS I/O Characteristics ](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/WindowsGuide/ebs-io-characteristics.html)
+ [ Using Amazon S3 storage classes ](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/storage-class-intro.html)
+  [What is Amazon Glacier?](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazonglacier/latest/dev/introduction.html) 

 **Related videos:** 
+  [Architectural Patterns for Data Lakes on AWS](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpTly4XHmqc&ab_channel=AWSEvents) 
+ [ Deep dive on Amazon EBS (STG303-R1) ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsMWANWNoqQ)
+ [ Optimize your storage performance with Amazon S3 (STG343) ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54AhwfME6wI)
+ [ Building modern data architectures on AWS](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uk2CqEt5f0o)

 **Related examples:** 
+ [ Amazon EFS CSI Driver ](https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/aws-efs-csi-driver)
+ [ Amazon EBS CSI Driver ](https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/aws-ebs-csi-driver)
+ [ Amazon EFS Utilities ](https://github.com/aws/efs-utils)
+ [ Amazon EBS Autoscale ](https://github.com/awslabs/amazon-ebs-autoscale)
+ [ Amazon S3 Examples ](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sdk-for-javascript/v2/developer-guide/s3-examples.html)