Last Update: Sep 04, 2024 | Published: Jul 17, 2018
In a recent post on the AWS News blog, Amazon announced several updates to the AWS Storage Gateway service. This is a product that was designed to serve as an interface between on-site and AWS cloud storage.
AWS Storage Gateway now allows users and applications to access their files using both v2 and v3 of the Server Message Block, or SMB, network protocol. As a result, users will now be able to transfer files between applications running locally on Windows machines and AWS S3 cloud storage. This can prove useful for those who may be looking for an easy way to increase storage and create offsite backups among other tasks.
For those users who store files in S3 buckets across multiple AWS accounts, AWS Storage Gateway now allows admins to give S3 buckets owned by other users full permissions. While this doesn’t necessarily seem like an important feature, it can be helpful to those who are using different AWS accounts for billing, tracking, or management purposes.
Storage Gateway now also supports the option for users to designate S3 buckets as “Requester Pay Buckets”. This will enable bucket owners to request payment for data storage and transfer costs associated with the bucket, should they choose to share that data with other users who request it. In its blog post, Amazon gave an example of this feature being useful in research scenarios, where many users are simultaneously collecting files and data for an organization using their own S3 buckets. The organization could then request the files from the independent users, who would be able to transfer it over to a central S3 bucket at the expense of the organization that requested the data.
Another update that Amazon announced is the ability for Storage Gateway users to receive
notifications when files have finished uploading (using Amazon’s CloudWatch service). These notifications can also be used to trigger events that occur upon the completion of the upload process. Related, users can also now make use of a new “Cache Refresh” event to check whether any changes have occurred within an S3 bucket since its contents were last listed.
For those that would like to give the above-mentioned features a try, they are all now available for use within Amazon’s AWS Storage Gateway.
Ensuring that one’s files are safely stored and always available is something that is critically important, especially with the number of organizations that are now using hybrid and cloud-based storage solutions. Whether it be sharing files for research and collaboration or simply knowing when a file has been uploaded so that it can then be processed, the tools available to admins and users can be as important as the data being stored. And with the recent updates to the AWS Storage Gateway, admins and users can rest a bit easier knowing that they have an abundance of tools available to help make their jobs a bit easier.