Amazon S3

Amazon S3 or Amazon Simple Storage Service is a service offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that provides object storage through a web service interface.^[1][2] Amazon S3 uses the same scalable storage infrastructure that Amazon.com uses to run its e-commerce network.^[3] Amazon S3 can store any type of object, which allows uses like storage for Internet applications, backups, disaster recovery, data archives, data lakes for analytics, and hybrid cloud storage. AWS launched Amazon S3 in the United States on March 14, 2006,^[1][4] then in Europe in November 2007.^[5]

Amazon S3

Amazon S3 Logo
Type of site	Cloud storage
Available in	English
Owner	Amazon.com
URL	aws.amazon.com/s3/
IPv6 support	Yes
Commercial	Yes
Registration	Required (included in free tier layer)
Launched	March 14, 2006; 18 years ago (2006-03-14)
Current status	Active

Technical details

Design

Amazon S3 manages data with an object storage architecture^[6] which aims to provide scalability, high availability, and low latency with high durability.^[3] The basic storage units of Amazon S3 are objects which are organized into buckets. Each object is identified by a unique, user-assigned key.^[7] Buckets can be managed using the console provided by Amazon S3, programmatically with the AWS SDK, or the REST application programming interface. Objects can be up to five terabytes in size.^[8][9] Requests are authorized using an access control list associated with each object bucket and support versioning^[10] which is disabled by default.^[11] Since buckets are typically the size of an entire file system mount in other systems, this access control scheme is very coarse-grained. In other words, unique access controls cannot be associated with individual files.^{[citation needed]} Amazon S3 can be used to replace static web-hosting infrastructure with HTTP client-accessible objects,^[12] index document support, and error document support.^[13] The Amazon AWS authentication mechanism allows the creation of authenticated URLs, valid for a specified amount of time. Every item in a bucket can also be served as a BitTorrent feed. The Amazon S3 store can act as a seed host for a torrent and any BitTorrent client can retrieve the file. This can drastically reduce the bandwidth cost for the download of popular objects. A bucket can be configured to save HTTP log information to a sibling bucket; this can be used in data mining operations.^[14] There are various User Mode File System (FUSE)–based file systems for Unix-like operating systems (for example, Linux) that can be used to mount an S3 bucket as a file system. The semantics of the Amazon S3 file system are not that of a POSIX file system, so the file system may not behave entirely as expected.^[15]

Amazon S3 storage classes

Amazon S3 offers nine different storage classes with different levels of durability, availability, and performance requirements.^[16]

• Amazon S3 Standard is the default. It is general purpose storage for frequently accessed data.
• Amazon S3 Express One Zone is a single-digit millisecond latency storage for frequently accessed data and latency-sensitive applications. It stores data only in one availability zone.^[17]
• Amazon S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (Standard-IA) is designed for less frequently accessed data, such as backups and disaster recovery data.
• Amazon S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access (One Zone-IA) performs like the Standard-IA, but stores data only in one availability zone.
• Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering moves objects automatically to a more cost-efficient storage class.
• Amazon S3 on Outposts brings storage to installations not hosted by Amazon.
• Amazon S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval is a low-cost storage for rarely accessed data, but which still requires rapid retrieval.
• Amazon S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval is also a low-cost option for long-lived data; it offers 3 retrieval speeds, ranging from minutes to hours.
• Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive is the lowest cost storage for long-lived archive data that is accessed less than once per year and is retrieved asynchronously.

The Amazon S3 Glacier storage classes above are distinct from Amazon Glacier, which is a separate product with its own APIs.

File size limits

An object in S3 can be between 0 bytes and 5TB. If an object is larger than 5TB, it must be divided into chunks prior to uploading. When uploading, Amazon S3 allows a maximum of 5GB in a single upload operation; hence, objects larger than 5GB must be uploaded via the S3 multipart upload API.^[18]

Uses

Notable users

• Photo hosting service SmugMug has used Amazon S3 since April 2006. They experienced a number of initial outages and slowdowns, but after one year they described it as being "considerably more reliable than our own internal storage" and claimed to have saved almost $1 million in storage costs.^[19]
• Netflix uses Amazon S3 as their system of record. Netflix implemented a tool, S3mper,^[20] to address the Amazon S3 limitations of eventual consistency.^[21] S3mper stores the filesystem metadata: filenames, directory structure, and permissions in Amazon DynamoDB.^[22]
• Reddit is hosted on Amazon S3.^[23]
• Bitcasa,^[24] and Tahoe-LAFS-on-S3,^[25] among others, use Amazon S3 for online backup and synchronization services. In 2016, Dropbox stopped using Amazon S3 services and developed its own cloud server.^[26][27]
• Swiftype's CEO has mentioned that the company uses Amazon S3.^[28]

S3 API and competing services

The broad adoption of Amazon S3 and related tooling has given rise to competing services based on the S3 API. These services use the standard programming interface but are differentiated by their underlying technologies and business models.^[29] A standard interface enables better competition from rival providers and allows economies of scale in implementation, among other benefits.^[30]

History

 

At AWS Summit 2013 NYC, CTO Werner Vogels announces 2 trillion objects stored in S3.

Amazon Web Services introduced Amazon S3 in 2006.^[31][32]

Date	Number of Items Stored
October 2007	10 billion^[33]
January 2008	14 billion^[33]
October 2008	29 billion^[34]
March 2009	52 billion^[35]
August 2009	64 billion^[36]
March 2010	102 billion^[37]
April 2013	2 trillion^[38]
March 2021	100 trillion^[39]

In November 2017 AWS added default encryption capabilities at bucket level.^[40]

See also

• Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS)
• Timeline of Amazon Web Services

References

Citations

1. "Amazon Web Services Launches "Amazon S3"" (Press release). 2006-03-14. from the original on 2018-11-15. Retrieved 2018-11-14.
2. Huang, Dijiang; Wu, Huijun (2017-09-08). Mobile Cloud Computing: Foundations and Service Models. Morgan Kaufmann. p. 67. ISBN 9780128096444. from the original on 2018-11-15. Retrieved 2018-11-15.
3. "Cloud Object Storage - Store & Retrieve Data Anywhere - Amazon Simple Storage Service". Amazon Web Services, Inc. from the original on 2018-05-17. Retrieved 2018-05-17.
4. "5 Key Events in the history of Cloud Computing - DZone Cloud". dzone.com. from the original on 2018-09-29. Retrieved 2018-09-28.
5. "Amazon Web Services Offers European Storage for Amazon S3" (Press release). 2007-11-06. from the original on 2018-11-15. Retrieved 2018-11-14.
6. "What is Cloud Object Storage? – AWS". Amazon Web Services, Inc. 2019-10-16. from the original on 2018-09-20. Retrieved 2018-07-09.
7. . techblog.aasisvinayak.com. Archived from the original on 2010-03-12.
8. "open-guides/og-aws". GitHub. from the original on 2018-01-03. Retrieved 2018-05-17.
9. "Error Responses - Amazon Simple Storage Service". docs.aws.amazon.com. from the original on 2017-12-24. Retrieved 2018-05-21.
10. "Using versioning in S3 buckets - Amazon Simple Storage Service".
11. "Introduction to Amazon S3 - Amazon Simple Storage Service". docs.aws.amazon.com. from the original on 2018-05-12. Retrieved 2018-05-17.
12. . bucketexplorer.com. Archived from the original on 2008-04-08. Retrieved 2008-05-06.
13. Amazon Simple Storage Service 2011-02-20 at the Wayback Machine Docs.amazonwebservices.com. Retrieved on 2013-08-09.
14. http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/ServerLogs.html 2014-12-23 at the Wayback Machine Server Access Logging
15. "Comparison of S3QL and other S3 file systems". from the original on 2012-08-05. Retrieved 2012-06-29.
16. "Cloud Storage Classes – Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) – AWS". Amazon Web Services, Inc. from the original on 2018-06-13. Retrieved 2018-05-17.
17. "Announcing the new Amazon S3 Express One Zone high performance storage class | AWS News Blog". aws.amazon.com. 2023-11-28. Retrieved 2023-12-01.
18. . June 21, 2022. Archived from the original on October 1, 2022. Retrieved June 22, 2022.
19. "Amazon S3: Show Me the Money". SmugMug Blog. SmugMug. November 10, 2006. from the original on 2017-03-03. Retrieved 2017-03-03.
20. "S3mper: Consistency in the Cloud". from the original on 2016-04-24. Retrieved 2016-05-01.
21. "Introduction to Amazon S3". Amazon. from the original on 2017-12-25. Retrieved 28 December 2017.
22. Hern, Alex (2017-02-02). "Amazon Web Services: the secret to the online retailer's future success". the Guardian. from the original on 2018-05-02. Retrieved 2018-04-23.
23. "AWS Case Study: reddit". aws.amazon.com. 2015. from the original on 2015-03-17. Retrieved March 18, 2015.
24. "Bitcasa Legal". May 16, 2013. Archived from the original on 2013-06-28. Retrieved 2013-05-16.
25. "What is Tahoe-LAFS-on-S3?". August 21, 2012. from the original on 2013-05-06. Retrieved 2012-08-21.
26. "The Epic Story of Dropbox's Exodus From the Amazon Cloud Empire". WIRED. from the original on 2018-01-25. Retrieved 2018-04-23.
27. "Dropbox saved almost $75 million over two years by building its own tech infrastructure". GeekWire. 2018-02-23. from the original on 2018-04-23. Retrieved 2018-04-23.
28. "Swiftype Explains Their Cloud Stack". July 1, 2013. from the original on 2014-12-08. Retrieved 2014-12-08.
29. Watters, Audrey (12 July 2010). "Cloud Community Debates, Is Amazon S3's API the Standard? (And Should It Be?)". SAY Media, Inc. from the original on 2013-02-17. Retrieved 19 December 2012.
30. Crossroads of Information Technology Standards. Committee on Standards Workshop Planning, Board on Telecommunications and Computer Applications, Commission on Engineering and Technical Systems, National Research Council. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 1990. 1990. pp. 36–37. doi:10.17226/10440. ISBN 978-0-309-58171-4. from the original on 2014-03-25. Retrieved 2014-03-25.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link)
31. Overview of Amazon Web Services, 2018, https://docs.aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/latest/aws-overview/introduction.html 2017-11-18 at the Wayback Machine
32. Garfinkel, Simson L. 2007. An Evaluation of Amazon's Grid Computing Services: EC2, S3, and SQS. Harvard Computer Science Group Technical Report TR-08-07. https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/24829568/tr-08-07.pdf?sequence=1 2018-07-29 at the Wayback Machine
33. Vogels, Werner (2008-03-19). "Happy Birthday, Amazon S3!". All Things Distributed. from the original on 2008-05-09. Retrieved 2008-05-23.
34. . 2008-10-08. Archived from the original on 2008-10-11. Retrieved 2008-10-09.
35. "Celebrating S3's Third Birthday With Special Anniversary Pricing - Amazon Web Services". typepad.com. 31 March 2009. from the original on 2011-07-07. Retrieved 2009-04-01.
36. "Amazon's Head Start in the Cloud Pays Off". eweek.com.^{[permanent dead link]}
37. "Amazon S3 Now Hosts 100 Billion Objects". datacenterknowledge.com. 9 March 2010. from the original on 2010-03-12. Retrieved 2010-03-09.
38. "Amazon S3 – Two Trillion Objects, 1.1 Million Requests / Second - Amazon Web Services". typepad.com. 18 April 2013.
39. "Celebrate 15 Years of Amazon S3 with 'Pi Week' Livestream Events". amazon.com. 14 March 2021.
40. "New Amazon S3 Encryption & Security Features". 6 November 2017.

Sources

• "Server Access Logging".
• "Amazon S3 Developer Guide". 2006-03-01.
• "Amazon S3 Introduces Storage Pricing Tiers". 2008-10-08.
• . 2007-10-27. Archived from the original on 2008-11-03. Retrieved 2009-01-07.