Peer Review

This guide presents cloud storage concepts in a clear, student-friendly way and focuses on practical choices. It explains object, block, and file storage, along with common performance and durability trade-offs. The guide also covers backup and archival patterns and describes how storage integrates with databases, analytics platforms, and content delivery systems. It emphasizes informed decision-making for real-world workloads rather than vendor-specific marketing.

NOTE: This material is part of Prep4Uni.online, a free, independent learning hub dedicated to making high-quality university preparation accessible to all students. The platform offers a structured, top-down curriculum covering STEM, Humanities, and Business, designed to build strong academic foundations through practical tools and conceptual clarity. To ensure the highest standards of validity, the content is curated and led by Dr. Jacob Gan, a retired university professor with a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan and over 20 years of experience in higher education and mentorship.

Reference Material

Students, Teachers, and Professionals: This curriculum provides students with the technical foundation to manage modern data lifecycles, empowers teachers to illustrate distributed system concepts through practical storage models, and enables professionals to architect scalable, cost-effective, and secure enterprise data solutions.

• For Faculty: Use the "Key Topics" breakdown to structure lab assignments. For instance, a faculty member can assign a project where students must configure an Amazon S3 (Object) bucket for a static site while using Amazon EBS (Block) for a backend database.

• For Students: The "Frequently Asked Questions" section is a high-value tool for interview preparation, especially for roles such as Cloud Support Associate or Junior Data Engineer.

Any Internet browser will suffice.

Learning Outcomes and Goals

• Distinguishing Storage Architectures: Students will identify the technical differences between Object, Block, and File storage, and learn to match them to specific workloads (e.g., databases vs. static web content).

• Data Lifecycle Mastery: Learners will understand the full lifecycle of data—from provisioning via Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to secure deletion and regulatory compliance.

• Resiliency & Redundancy Planning: Students will learn to design for high availability by implementing data redundancy across multiple geographic regions to prevent data loss.

College General Ed, College Lower Division, College Upper Division, Graduate School, Professional

None.