Overview of How Amazon S3 Works and Its Key Features
AWS Series (Part-7)
Table of contents
What is Amazon S3
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage solution that leads the industry, specializing in data availability, security, performance, and scalability. Amazon S3 can be used for storing and safeguarding any volume of data for various applications, including big data analytics, enterprise applications, backup and restore, mobile applications, websites, and IoT devices.
Key Features of S3
Buckets and Objects:
In S3, the data is stored as objects within buckets. A file and any metadata that pertains to it are considered objects. A folder where the objects are stored is called a bucket. A bucket can hold any number of objects, and your account can contain up to 100 buckets. In the S3 namespace, every bucket has a globally unique name. The highest-level container for storing objects is a bucket.
S3 URLs:
All objects in Amazon S3 have a unique URL assigned to them, which is called an S3 URL. The bucket name, S3 endpoint, and object key—a special identification for each object inside the bucket—combine to form the URL.
Storage Classes:
For various use cases, Amazon S3 provides a variety of storage classes. S3 Standard-IA or S3 One Zone-IA, for instance, are cost-effective places to store rarely accessed data. S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval, S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval, and S3 Glacier Deep Archive are the best places to archive data at the lowest possible cost.
Durability and Reliability:
The durability of Amazon S3 is intended to be 99.999999999% (11 9s). This indicates that there is a very slim chance, statistically speaking, of losing an object kept in S3. By replicating data across several geographically separated data centers within a chosen AWS region, the service achieves this high durability.
Reliability: Reliability is a well-known attribute of Amazon S3. With features like data replication, which makes sure that copies of your objects are kept in several places, it achieves high reliability. Redundancy helps guard against network problems, hardware malfunctions, and other localized disruptions.
Versioning: Versioning is an Amazon S3 feature that lets you store multiple versions of an object in a bucket. Amazon S3 automatically archives all versions of an object when versioning is enabled for a bucket, giving users access to a history of changes.
Lifecycle Policies: You can automatically manage the lifecycle of your objects in an S3 bucket by using Amazon S3 lifecycle policies. Using lifecycle policies, you can set up guidelines for moving objects between storage classes, archiving or deleting them, and lowering storage expenses in response to shifting data access patterns.
Event Notifications: You can set up Amazon S3 event notifications to get notified when specific things happen in your S3 bucket. These events have the ability to start workflows in AWS Step Functions, send messages to an Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) topic, and invoke Lambdas in other AWS services. With the help of event notifications, you can respond to changes in your S3 data, automate workflows, and connect S3 with other AWS services.
Static Website Hosting: Static websites can be hosted on Amazon S3, offering a straightforward and affordable alternative to serving web content directly from S3 without requiring a conventional web server.
Integration with AWS: S3 is an essential part of many cloud-based architectures and solutions because it easily interacts with other AWS services. S3 can be used as a data lake, for instance, or combined with AWS Lambda to enable serverless processing or content delivery via Amazon CloudFront.
Conclusion
Many different types of companies and developers use Amazon S3 for things like data lakes, content distribution, backup and restore, and data archiving. Many cloud-based workflows and applications rely on it as a fundamental service due to its dependability and flexibility.