Amazon S3

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service enabling web-scale computing. It is a scalable, high-speed, web-based cloud storage service designed for data storage and archiving, application hosting for deployment, installation, and management of web apps, software delivery, data backup, disaster recovery, running big data analytics tools on stored data, website hosting, and so on.

You can transfer data to S3 over the public internet via access to S3 application programming interfaces.

Key features

• Low latency and high throughput performance.
• Designed for durability of 99.999999999% of objects across multiple Availability Zones.
• Resilient against events that impact an entire Availability Zone.
• Designed for 99.99% availability over a given year.
• Supports SSL for data in transit and encryption of data at rest.
• S3 Lifecycle management for automatic migration of objects to other S3 Storage Classes.

Key concepts

• Buckets: A bucket is a container for objects stored in Amazon S3. A bucket exists within a particular region of the cloud. Every object is contained in a bucket. An object consists of data, key (assigned name), and metadata. When data is added to a bucket, Amazon S3 creates a unique version ID and allocates it to the object.
• Objects: Objects are the fundamental entities stored in Amazon S3. Objects consist of object data and metadata. The data portion is opaque to Amazon S3. The metadata is a set of name-value pairs that describe the object.
• Keys: A key is a unique identifier for an object within a bucket. Every object in a bucket has exactly one key. The combination of a bucket, key, and version ID uniquely identifies each object.
• Regions: You can choose the geographical AWS Region where Amazon S3 will store the buckets that you create. You might choose a Region to optimize latency, minimize costs, or address regulatory requirements. You can only access Amazon S3 and its features in AWS Regions that are enabled for your account.

Amazon S3 storage classes

Amazon S3 comes in seven storage classes:

1. S3 Standard is suitable for frequently accessed data that needs to be delivered with low latency and high throughput.
2. S3 Intelligent-Tiering is most suitable for data with access needs that are either changing or unknown.
3. S3 Standard-IA offers a lower storage price for data that is needed less often but that must be quickly accessible.
4. S3 One Zone-IA is designed for data that is used infrequently but requires rapid access on the occasions that it is needed.
5. S3 Glacier is strictly designed for archival storage because it takes longer to access the data.
6. S3 Glacier Deep Archive is designed to retain data that only needs to be accessed once or twice a year.
7. S3 Outposts adds S3 object storage features and APIs to an on-premises AWS Outposts environment.