AWS Simple Storage Service (S3)

Santanu Majumdar
3 min readMar 30, 2023

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Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) is a highly scalable and secure object storage service offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS). It allows users to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere on the web. S3 is designed to provide 99.999999999% durability and 99.99% availability of objects over a given year.

S3 offers a simple web services interface to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. With S3, you can store as many objects as you want and as large as 5TB per object. The service is built to be highly scalable and is capable of handling trillions of objects with ease. S3 is a highly available and fault-tolerant storage service that is designed to provide exceptional durability and availability.

Secure

S3 is highly secure and offers various features to ensure the safety of stored data. The service provides server-side encryption for data at rest and in-transit encryption for data in motion. S3 also provides access control mechanisms to ensure that only authorized users have access to data. Users can set permissions at the object and bucket levels using access control lists (ACLs) and bucket policies. Additionally, S3 supports integration with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), which allows users to create and manage access policies for their S3 resources.

Flexible

S3 is highly flexible and can be used for various use cases such as backup and restore, disaster recovery, data archiving, content delivery, and big data analytics. It can also be integrated with other AWS services such as Amazon EC2, Amazon Glacier, Amazon CloudFront, Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR), and Amazon Redshift.

Cost Effective

S3 offers a highly cost-effective pricing model that allows users to pay only for what they use. The service offers various storage classes such as S3 Standard, S3 Intelligent-Tiering, S3 Standard-Infrequent Access, S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access, and Amazon S3 Glacier, each with different storage and retrieval pricing tiers. S3 also offers a free tier that allows users to store up to 5GB of data and retrieve up to 20,000 requests per month for free.

Types of Storage in S3

There are different types of storage in S3 that we can select based on the cost and our requirements.

S3 standard is the default storage type and Amazon glacier will be very cheap as it is for long-term archives. In S3 our data gets replicated in multiple zones automatically and we don’t get to choose our availability zone, though we can choose the region where we want to create the S3 bucket.

Apart from that, we can also automatically move our data from one storage type to other depending on the no of days or usage.

After the day is passed, AWS will automatically switch the storage type.

Conclusion

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) is a highly scalable, secure, and cost-effective object storage service offered by AWS. It offers a simple web services interface that allows users to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere on the web. S3 is highly flexible and can be used for various use cases, and it integrates seamlessly with other AWS services. With S3, users can be assured of exceptional durability, availability, and security of their data at all times.

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Santanu Majumdar
Santanu Majumdar

Written by Santanu Majumdar

Sr. Technical Program Manager — LinkedIn

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