Amazon S3 is a part of Amazon Web Services that provides a reliable, durable, highly-scalable, cost-effective object storage. Developers and IT teams can use it for a wide range of projects, like cloud applications, content distribution, data storage, backup and archiving, data analytics, and disaster recovery. To cover more needs Amazon S3 can be used together with other AWS services, including Amazon EC2, Amazon EBS, and Amazon Glacier, or other third party storage repositories and gateways.
You can store virtually any kind of data in any format. S3 includes support for hosting static websites with Index document support and error document support. This service is available for all, regardless budget or project size. Developers can begin with a small application and continue developing its capabilities even when storage growth is unpredictable. Amazon S3 is highly scalable and flexible. You pay only for what you use, no minimum fee or setup cost, so there is no need in performance or reliability compromise. No matter how application or business needs change, S3 services will remain cost-efficient and will keep data accessible, available, and secure.
S3 storage infrastructure
S3's design aims at ensuring scalability, high availability, and low latency. The total volume of data and number of objects that can be stored are unlimited. The size of stored object can range from 1 byte to 5 terabytes. Objects are organized into buckets and identified within each bucket by a unique, user-assigned key.
A simple web interface allows to create, store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere on the web. There are several options of interaction: add or retrieve buckets and objects via either a REST-style HTTP interface or a SOAP interface. To extend capabilities, data can also be downloaded with the HTTP GET interface and the BitTorrent protocol.
Advantages of Amazon S3
Data Management
Amazon S3’s extensive data management features simplify your life and take care of data all the way from creation and initial storage to its transfer and deletion. This service offers capabilities to define data lifecycle rules that help to automate migration to new hardware, archival to lower cost storage (e.g. Amazon Glacier), and scheduled deletions. They complement cost monitoring and controlling features, because they assist in reducing costs spent over an object’s lifetime.
Data security
S3 supports the same high standards of security as all AWS projects, so data is well protected from both logical and physical failures, service prevents data loss because of application errors, unintended user actions, and infrastructure failures. Only object owners can have access to their resources. S3 enables several choices for key management and can automatically encrypt stored data at rest. This service ensures encryption for both secure transit and secure storage using the SSL-encrypted endpoints with the HTTPS protocol. Amazon S3 supports four different access control mechanisms: AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies, Access Control Lists (ACLs), bucket policies, and query string authentication. Among other security features are Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) Delete, audit logs, and versioning.
Data Durability
Even if your data is mission-critical and primary, S3’s storage infrastructure was designed to be highly durable and automatically self-healing. It synchronously stores data across multiple facilities and on multiple devices. There is no need in tedious data verification, since S3 performs regular, systematic data integrity checks to detect data corruption. Moreover, S3 can send event notifications to inform about actions taken on stored objects. They give users opportunity to immediately respond to those actions by triggering workflows, alerts, or other processing.
Data Transfer
AWS Import/Export assists in quick and safe transferring of large amounts of data into and out of storage. Data can be moved via Amazon’s high-speed internal network instead of the Internet. This way is faster and less expensive. Import/Export feature can be applied for different use cases, for instance, during data migration into the cloud, while distributing content to customers, sending backups to AWS, or for disaster recovery. Another service, AWS Direct Connect, ensures reliable data transfer to Amazon S3 by establishing private connectivity between AWS and datacenter, office, or other environment.
Interested in more?
Amazon Simple Storage Service allows to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere on the web through simple web services interface. Pay only for the storage you actually use and receive a highly-scalable, reliable, and low-latency data storage infrastructure at all times. For more details visit http://aws.amazon.com/s3.