Amazon S3 Tutorial

Amazon S3 is short for Amazon Simple Storage Service. It is a storage service of AWS (Amazon Web Services) that offers data access security, quick data availability, durability, and scalability. It can be used to store any amount of data for websites, enterprise applications, IoT devices, backup and restore, etc. S3 is used by millions of applications for storing files and data by companies all around the world.

Features of Amazon S3

Amazon S3 provides many features to make organizing and managing of data easier. Following are the list of features of S3:

  • In S3, data is stored as objects in buckets. A bucket is a logical container for storing data. S3 supports a single object of upto 5 terabytes in size.
  • All objects in buckets can be organized using prefixes. Prefixes are the full path of the object's location that comes before the file name and upto the last '/' character of the file path.
  • S3 has capability to add metatags to objects.
  • S3 object tags which is a key/value pairs can be added to each objects. These object tags can be created, updated, and deleted all throught the object's life cycle.
  • S3 has capability to configure and enforce security on data access, allowing only authorized users to access data.
  • S3 has capability to move and store data between the S3 Storage classes.
  • S3 has capability to run big data analytics.
  • Data in S3, can be monitored at both object and bucket levels.
  • S3 provides a point to access data. Data can also be accessed directly using the bucket hostname.
  • S3 provides configurable inventory report using which objects and their respective tags, buckets, and prefixes can be tracked.
  • S3 supports batch operations by providing a solution called S3 Batch Operations. The S3 Batch Operations makes it possible for storing data of any scale, from thousands to billions of objects in a single request. Using S3 API request or the Amazon S3 Management Console, you can copy any number of objects from one bucket to another, modify existing access control, restore archieve objects from Amazon S3 Glacier, etc. S3 Batch Operations also supports running of Lambda functions for implementing custom business logic across objects.
  • S3 has versioning feature that keeps record of every version. Using this version control, the stored data in Amazon S3 can be preserved, retrieved, and restored to every version.
  • The data in S3 can also be prevented from accidental deletions by enabling MFA (Multi-Factor Authentication) Delete on S3 buckets.
  • S3 has S3 Replication feature that allows to replicate data to any AWS Region.