AWS Storage Gateway

Storage

Hybrid storage appliance that gives on-premises apps file, block, or tape access to AWS storage, with a local cache for speed.

Verified against AWS documentation · 2026-09-09

Key facts

  1. 01Runs on-prem as a VM (VMware / Hyper-V / KVM) or an AWS hardware appliance, or in AWS as an EC2 AMI — apps keep speaking NFS, SMB, or iSCSI and never know they're hitting the cloud
  2. 02Four types: S3 File Gateway (NFS/SMB → S3 objects, 1:1), FSx File Gateway (SMB → FSx for Windows), Volume Gateway (iSCSI block → S3, backed up as EBS snapshots), Tape Gateway (virtual tape library → S3 Glacier)
  3. 03Local cache holds hot data, AWS holds the durable copy — Volume Gateway cached mode keeps the primary dataset in AWS with a hot subset local; stored mode keeps everything local and backs up asynchronously
  4. 04Reality check: FSx File Gateway has been closed to new customers since October 2024, though exam material still lists all four types

Exam triggers

Phrases and scenarios that point here.

  • "On-premises", "existing applications", "without modifying", "hybrid" + AWS storage → Storage Gateway
  • Retire a physical tape library but keep the existing backup software → Tape Gateway
  • On-prem app needs low-latency access to recent data while the bulk sits in the cloud → the local cache is the giveaway
  • Protocol names the type: NFS/SMB → File Gateway, iSCSI volumes → Volume Gateway, iSCSI VTL → Tape Gateway

Not this service

  • One-time bulk move of huge data, or no usable network → AWS Snow Family
  • Ongoing scheduled transfers between storage systems, no local cache or protocol translation → AWS DataSync
  • Shared file system for workloads already in AWS, nothing on-prem → EFS (Linux) or FSx (Windows)

Use cases

  1. 01A hospital's imaging system keeps writing scans to the same SMB share — except the share is an S3 File Gateway, so every scan lands in S3 for archival and analytics while radiologists still open them at LAN speed
  2. 02Retiring the tape robot in the basement: the backup software still sees tapes and drives, but the tapes are virtual and age into Glacier Deep Archive — no courier, no offsite vault contract
  3. 03A factory with a 20 TB CAD file server where engineers actually touch about 2 TB — Volume Gateway cached mode keeps that working set on-site and pushes the rest to S3, so the next hardware refresh can be a smaller box
  4. 04Dropping daily video rushes onto an NFS mount that is really S3, so a Lambda fires on the object write and transcoding happens in the cloud without anyone building an upload pipeline
  5. 05DR on a budget: Volume Gateway stored mode keeps production data local at full speed and snapshots it to AWS — if the site is lost, restore the snapshot as an EBS volume and boot on EC2

How it's charged

  1. 01The gateway software itself is free — you pay for the AWS storage it fills (S3, EBS snapshots, Glacier) at those services' normal rates
  2. 02$0.01 per GB written to AWS by the gateway, capped at $125 per gateway per month, first 100 GB per account per month free — the cap is the one number worth memorizing
  3. 03Uploads to AWS are free; pulling data back down to the gateway is billed as data transfer out, so a cold cache after a rebuild costs real money
  4. 04Tape Gateway: archived tapes are cheap to store in Glacier or Deep Archive, but retrieval is charged per GB and early deletion (before 90 / 180 days) triggers a prorated fee
  5. 05Running the gateway on EC2 adds normal EC2 and EBS charges on top; running it on your own on-prem hardware adds nothing

Commonly confused with

Amazon EBSStorageAmazon EFSStorage

References