Taxonomy of Cloud Storage Systems

Category	Definition	Example
Instance Storage	Storage that is a part of the file system on the VM.	Amazon EC2
Object Storage	Storage of binary objects provided using a Web service.	Azure Blob, Amazon S3
Block Storage	Virtual block device that can be mounted as a local disk to a VM.	Amazon EBS
Relational Data Storage:	Relational Database provided using a Web service	Amazon RDS, Azure SQL
Semi-structured Data Storage:	Database service for storing semi structured data with high availability, high scalability and high performance.	HBase
Distributed File System	Distributed storage provided through file system interfaces with high availability and high scalability.	HDFS
Online Drive/Folder Service	Storage space provided in the form of virtual driver or folder on Internet.	Microsoft SkyDrive, Box.net, Dropbox

Cloud Storage