What is Amazon S3?

Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is cloud based object storage service.

Amazon S3 Introduction Video

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What is Amazon S3?

Amazon S3 is a secure and redundant storage system that uses a flat object storage structure.

Data is stored in three different physical availability zone that also provides redundancy.

Different storage classes options are offered, balacing cost and availability. Automated management of storage can move objects to cheaper storage classes if they are accessed infrequently. Objects can also be automatically expire and be deleted after a specified time.

Access can be managed by access control lists or AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM).

Server access requests to buckets can be logged for security and analytics. AWS CloudTrail also enables logging at object level.

Amazon S3 can also be used to host static websites and client-side scripts.

Object storage systems

Objects are contained in buckets and can scale up easily. This allows storage of large amounts of unstructured data.

Metadata for objects can be customized to identify and classify data for easy data retrieval and organization.

Amazon S3 Pricing

Pricing depends on storage classes. Lower cost options will have lower availability, and are more suitable for longer term archiving of data.

Amazon S3 buckets can also be configured to make the requester pay for request and retrieval, rather than the owner.