☁️ Storage Wars: Cloud Edition
The 4th issue of "The Cloud Decoder" series
Buckets, Blobs, Blocks, and Bills.
Welcome back, cloud wanderer. Today we dive into the magical land of cloud storage — a place where your files live forever, and so does your bill.
If you thought storage was simple (“it’s just files”), the cloud providers would like a word.
And that word is: egress — the new “gotcha” that replaces licensing fees, printer toner, and whatever it was VMware used to charge you for.
Let’s decode the storage chaos.
🍯 Object Storage (aka “Files but Fancy”)
This is the cloud’s favorite storage type. They all have their own flavor:
AWS: S3
Azure: Blob Storage
GCP: Cloud Storage
It’s basically files in a bucket. Buckets which, by the way, will absolutely still be named mybucket123 because naming things is still the hardest part of IT.
Great for backups, logs, images, and “data we should probably keep but hope to never touch again.”
Downside: Retrieving your own data sometimes costs more than storing it.
📦 Block Storage (aka “Hard Drive… in the Sky”)
These are the virtual disks you attach to your VMs:
EBS
Azure Managed Disks
GCP Persistent Disks
They’re fast, reliable, predictable — exactly the personality you want in storage.
Downside:
Delete a VM, forget the unattached disk, and suddenly you’re sponsoring a $140/mo orphaned SSD.
📁 File Storage (aka “SMB/NFS, but With More Steps”)
Cloud file storage keeps your legacy apps alive long enough for you to migrate them “next quarter,” which is what you’ve been saying for four years.
Common services:
AWS EFS / FSx
Azure Files
GCP Filestore
Great for shared folders, lift-and-shift apps, or anything written by that developer who quit in 2013.
Downside: Highly available, highly convenient, highly priced.
💸 Pricing Gotchas (aka “Welcome to the Egress Casino”)
Cloud storage pricing is like an amusement park:
PUT requests = entry fee
GET requests = the snacks
Storage tier fees = gift shop
Egress fees = rollercoaster that breaks your soul
Archive tiers are cheap… until you need something back. Then the retrieval fees politely ask for your wallet, car keys, and retirement plan.
🏷️ Naming Conventions: The True Final Boss
Every cloud bucket looks like something generated by a toddler:
prod-bucket-finalbackups-please-workdelete-this-later-but-not-nowidk-test?
You try to be organized.
Your teammates try to be “creative.”
Audit season tries to be painful.
🧠 Quick Cloud Decoder: Storage Edition
Here’s the fast translation your brain actually wants:
On-prem file share?
That becomes S3, Blob Storage, or GCP Cloud Storage.SAN LUNs and virtual disks?
That’s EBS, Azure Managed Disks, or GCP Persistent Disks.NAS appliances (Synology, NetApp, etc.)?
In the cloud, that becomes EFS, Azure Files, or GCP Filestore.On-prem question: “Why is the disk full?”
Cloud question: “Why does storage cost more than compute?”
The fundamentals didn’t change — the naming, billing, and dashboards did.
🎯 Takeaway
Cloud storage isn’t complicated.
It’s just unnecessarily dramatic.
Know your storage types. Watch your egress. And name your buckets like someone else might have to read them—
even though they absolutely won’t.
Paid subscribers get the full deep dive — including storage tiers, cost traps, real-world architecture examples, and naming conventions that save future-you from therapy.
— JJ – Chief Packet Pusher.