Block Storage
ELI5 — The Vibe Check
Block storage is like a virtual hard drive that you attach to a cloud server. The server sees it as a regular disk — your OS and apps can read/write to it fast, just like a local SSD. Need to store your database files? You need block storage, not object storage, for the performance.
Real Talk
Block storage provides raw storage volumes that appear as physical disks to virtual machines. Data is stored in fixed-size blocks without metadata overhead. Used for OS volumes, databases requiring low-latency I/O, and stateful applications. Examples: AWS EBS, GCP Persistent Disk, Azure Managed Disks.
When You'll Hear This
"Attach an EBS volume for the database to use as block storage." / "Block storage gives you much lower latency than object storage for database workloads."
Related Terms
Cloud Storage
Cloud storage is just storing your files on someone else's servers in the cloud instead of your own hard drive.
Database
A database is like a super-organized filing cabinet for your app's data.
EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud)
EC2 is AWS's way of renting you a virtual computer in the cloud. You pick how powerful it is, what OS it runs, and pay by the hour.
File Storage
File storage in the cloud is a shared network drive that multiple servers can mount at the same time.
Object Storage
Object storage treats files as 'objects' — each one gets a unique key (like a URL) and is stored with its data and metadata.