Best practice 9.2 – Identify and evaluate the available storage options for your compute solution

Many AWS data analytics services allow you to use more than one type of storage. For example, Amazon Redshift allows access to data stored in the compute nodes in addition to data stored in Amazon S3. When performing research on each data analytics service, evaluate relevant storage options to determine the most performance efficient solution that meets business requirements.

Suggestion 9.2.1 – Review the available storage options for the analytics services being considered

There are often multiple storage options available for each service, each offering different characteristics and potentially performance benefits. It is important to review these available options and determine which may best fit your requirements.

For example, Amazon EMR provides local storage via HDFS file system and Amazon S3 as an external storage via EMRFS. For more information, refer to the AWS documentation for your compute solution:

Suggestion 9.2.2 – Evaluate the performance of the selected storage option

To ensure that the overall analytics system design meets your non-functional requirements, evaluate the performance by running simulated real-world tests in a test environment.