Introduction to S3
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service which offers scalability, availability, performance and security and is accessible via a web service API.
Key Features
- unlimited amount of data
- accessible via API or URL
- finely tuned access controls
- replicated within availability zones
- easy server-side encryption
- high durability 11 9s (lose 1 object in a billion every 100 years)
Use Cases For Using S3
- website static content (html, pdf, txt, xml)
- website media content (images, videos, audio)
- website scripts, stylesheets and fonts
- static web sites
- single page application websites
- mobile applications
- backup and restore
- archival of files
- enterprise applications
- IoT device logs
- intermediate and long term staging of event data
- long term storage of analytic data and aggregated results
Use Cases For Not Using S3
- frequently updated data
- structured data
- long term data storage for rarely accessed data (move to Glacier when unlikely to be accessed)
Good Companions For Amazon S3
- Amazon Glacier
- Cloudfront CDN
- Cloudwatch Logging
- AWS KMS
Advanced Features of Amazon S3
- Bucket policies
- Lifecycle policies to delete or archive objects
- Expiring presigned URLs
