Amazon S3 is object storage built to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere – web sites and mobile apps, corporate applications, and data from IoT sensors or devices.
You can store any type of file in S3.
S3 is designed to deliver 99.999999999% durability, and stores data for millions of applications used by market leaders in every industry.
S3 provides comprehensive security and compliance capabilities that meet even the most stringent regulatory requirements.
S3 gives customers flexibility in the way they manage data for cost optimization, access control, and compliance.
Typical use cases include:
- Backup and Storage – Provide data backup and storage services for others.
- Application Hosting – Provide services that deploy, install, and manage web applications.
- Media Hosting – Build a redundant, scalable, and highly available infrastructure that hosts video, photo, or music uploads and downloads.
- Software Delivery – Host your software applications that customers can download.
- Static Website – you can configure a static website to run from an S3 bucket.
S3 provides query-in-place functionality, allowing you to run powerful analytics directly on your data at rest in S3. And Amazon S3 is the most supported cloud storage service available, with integration from the largest community of third-party solutions, systems integrator partners, and other AWS services.
Files can be anywhere from 0 bytes to 5 TB.
There is unlimited storage available.
Files are stored in buckets.
Buckets are root level folders.
Any subfolder within a bucket is known as a “folder”.
S3 is a universal namespace so bucket names must be unique globally.
There are seven S3 storage classes.
- S3 Standard (durable, immediately available, frequently accessed).
- S3 Intelligent-Tiering (automatically moves data to the most cost-effective tier).
- S3 Standard-IA (durable, immediately available, infrequently accessed).
- S3 One Zone-IA (lower cost for infrequently accessed data with less resilience).
- S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval (data that is rarely accessed and requires retrieval in milliseconds).
- S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval (archived data, retrieval times in minutes or hours).
- S3 Glacier Deep Archive (lowest cost storage class for long term retention).
When you successfully upload a file to S3 you receive a HTTP 200 code.
S3 is a persistent, highly durable data store.
Persistent data stores are non-volatile storage systems that retain data when powered off.
This contrasts with transient data stores and ephemeral data stores which lose the data when powered off.
The following table provides a description of persistent, transient, and ephemeral data stores and which AWS service to use:
| Storage Type | Description | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Persistent Data Store | Data is durable and sticks around after reboots, restarts, or power cycles | S3, Glacier, EBS, EFS |
| Transient Data Store | Data is just temporarily stored and passed along to another process or persistent store | SQS, SNS |
| Ephemeral Data Store | Data is lost when the system is stopped | EC2 Instance Store,Memcached |
Bucket names must follow a set of rules:
- Names must be unique across all of AWS.
- Names must be 3 to 63 characters in length.
- Names can only contain lowercase letters, numbers, and hyphens.
- Names cannot be formatted as an IP address.
Objects consist of:
- Key (name of the object).
- Value (data made up of a sequence of bytes).
- Version ID (used for versioning).
- Metadata (data about the data that is stored).
Subresources:
- Access control lists.
- Torrent.
Object sharing – the ability to make any object publicly available via a URL.
Lifecycle management – set rules to transfer objects between storage classes at defined time intervals.
Versioning – automatically keep multiple versions of an object (when enabled).
Encryption can be enabled for bucket.
Data is secured using ACLs and bucket policies.
Charges:
- Storage.
- Requests.
- Storage management pricing.
- Data transfer pricing.
- Transfer acceleration.
When you create a bucket, you need to select the region where it will be created.
It is a best practice to create buckets in regions that are physically closest to your users to reduce latency.
Additional capabilities offered by Amazon S3 include:
| Additional S3 Capability | How it Works |
|---|---|
| Transfer Acceleration | Speed up data uploads using CloudFront in reverse |
| Requester Pays | The requester rather than the bucket owner pays for requests and data transfer |
| Tags | Assign tags to objects to use in costing, billing, security etc. |
| Events | Trigger notifications to SNS, SQS, or Lambda when certain events happen in your bucket |
| Static Web Hosting | Simple and massively scalable static website hosting |
| BitTorrent | Use the BitTorrent protocol to retrieve any publicly available object by automatically generating a .torrent file |
Pricing
Storage pricing is determined by:
- Storage class – e.g., Standard or IA.
- Storage quantity – data volume stored in your buckets on a per GB basis.
- Number of requests – the number and type of requests, e.g., GET, PUT, POST, LIST, COPY.
- Lifecycle transitions requests – moving data between storage classes.
- Data transfer – data transferred out of an S3 region is charged.
Amazon Glacier pricing
- Extremely low cost and you pay only for what you need with no commitments of upfront fees.
- Charged for requests and data transferred out of Glacier.
- “Amazon Glacier Select” pricing allows queries to run directly on data stored on Glacier without having to retrieve the archive. Priced on amount of data scanned, returned, and number of requests initiated.