System Design on AWS

Chapter 2. Storage Types and Relational Stores

Data storage is an essential component of modern computing systems that plays a vital role in system design. As businesses and organizations grow, they generate and store vast amounts of data, which makes it important to have a scalable, reliable storage infrastructure that can keep up with the increasing demands. Efficient, reliable storage of data is necessary to ensure that applications and services can function effectively and provide optimal performance to end users. Various types of data storage solutions are available, ranging from traditional file-based systems to more modern block and object stores. Databases also play a significant role in storing and managing structured data, making them a critical aspect of system design.

In this chapter, we will explore different types of data storage solutions in the context of system design. We will start by discussing traditional file-based storage systems and their limitations before moving on to block and object stores, which have become increasingly popular in recent years because they can handle large amounts of unstructured data.

We also cover the different types of relational databases in this chapter. (We will look at nonrelational stores in Chapter 3). As we examine the challenges of scaling relational databases, we’ll cover various techniques, such as indexes, SQL tuning, denormalization, federation, partitioning, sharding, and replication, that can improve performance and ...