Amazon S3

Amazon S3 is designed to be secure, reliable, scalable, fast, inexpensive, and simple. It is especially great for hosting static files such as images, videos, Javascript, and CSS. In short, “Amazon S3 enables developers to focus on innovating with data, rather than figuring out how to store it.”

Accessible Storage

Amazon Simple Storage Service, or Amazon S3, is an online file storage web service of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon.com’s cloud computing platform. Through the use of the AWS Management Console’s simple and intuitive web interfaces (REST, SOAP, and BitTorrent), Amazon S3 is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers by allowing them to store and retrieve data at any time anywhere web access is available.

Amazon S3 provides highly durable and available cloud storage for everything from web applications to media files. Developers can offload their entire storage infrastructure onto the cloud, where they can benefit from Amazon S3’s scalability and pay-as-you-go pricing.

New customers receive up to 5 gigabytes of online data storage for free, with commercial tiered plans available for those in need of additional storage or more intensive data transfers.

Cheap and Flixible to Use

Amazon S3’s simple web services interface makes it easy and comfortable to use. Rather than having to buy physical storage devices and an IT team to monitor and maintain them, you can store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere on the web. This means more space for a lower cost. Amazon S3’s storage is highly scalable; you can increase or decrease your storage as needed, never having to worry if you have enough or are paying for too much. That means you pay only for the storage you actually use, and there’s no minimum fee and no setup cost.

How Amazon S3 Works

Amazon S3 stores arbitrary objects, or computer files, up to 5 terabytes in size, with each accompanied by metadata of up to 2 kilobytes. Objects are organized into buckets (each owned by an AWS account), and identifiable in each bucket by a unique, user-assigned key. This content can be exported to Amazon EC2 for computation, resizing, or other large-scale analytics without data transfer charges for moving the data between the services. Users can then choose Amazon S3’s standard cloud storage or the Reduced Redundancy Storage feature to store the resulting, reproducible content.

The Stress Relief of Version Control

In addition to backups and archives, Amazon S3 has Versioning capability, which provides even further protection for stored data. AWS Import/Export can move large data sets of significant size into and out of AWS with physical storage devices, ideal for periodic backups or disaster recovery scenarios. Amazon S3 also provides an inexpensive, scaling, and highly available hosting solution for entire static websites; the web service is designed for 99.99% availability and 99.999999999% durability. Amazon S3’s web-hosting solution is ideal for sites with static content, including HTML files, images, videos, and client-side scripts such as JavaScript.