S3

S3 - Simple Storage Service

It's an IaaS service.

  • Highly Available

  • Durable

  • Cost Effective

  • Widely Accessible

  • Uptime of 99.99%

  1. Objects and Buckets: The fundamental elements of Amazon S3 are objects and buckets. Objects are the individual data pieces stored in Amazon S3, while buckets are containers for these objects. An object consists of a file and, optionally, any metadata that describes that file.

    1. It's also a regional service, meaning that when you create a bucket, you specify a region, and all objects are stored there.

    2. Globally Unique: The name of an Amazon S3 bucket must be unique across all of Amazon S3, that is, across all AWS customers. It's like a domain name.

    3. Globally Accessible: Even though you specify a particular region when you create a bucket, once the bucket is created, you can access it from anywhere in the world using the appropriate URL.

  2. Scalability: Amazon S3 can scale in terms of storage, request rate, and users to support unlimited web-scale applications.

  3. Security: Amazon S3 includes several robust security features, such as encryption for data at rest and in transit, access controls like Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies, bucket policies, and Access Control Lists (ACLs), and features for monitoring and logging activity, like AWS CloudTrail.

  4. Data transfer: Amazon S3 supports transfer acceleration, which speeds up uploads and downloads of large objects.

  5. Event Notification: S3 can notify you of specific events in your bucket. For instance, you could set up a notification to alert you when an object is deleted from your bucket.

  6. Management Features: S3 has a suite of features to help manage your data, including lifecycle management, which allows you to define rules for moving or expiring objects, versioning to keep multiple versions of an object in the same bucket, and analytics for understanding and optimizing storage costs.

  7. Consistency: Amazon S3 provides read-after-write consistency for PUTS of new objects and eventual consistency for overwrite PUTS and DELETES.

    1. Read-after-write Consistency for PUTS of New Objects: When a new object is uploaded (PUT) into an Amazon S3 bucket, it's immediately accessible for read (GET) operations. This is known as read-after-write consistency. You can immediately retrieve a new object as soon as you create it. This applies across all regions in AWS, and it's crucial when immediate, accurate data retrieval is required.

    2. Eventual Consistency for Overwrite PUTS and DELETES: Overwrite PUTS and DELETES refer to operations where an existing object is updated (an overwrite PUT) or removed (a DELETE). For these operations, Amazon S3 provides eventual consistency. If you update or delete an object and immediately attempt to read or delete it, you might still get the old version or find it there (in the case of a DELETE) for a short period. This state of affairs is temporary, and shortly after the update or deletion, you'll see the new version or find the object gone, as expected.

Data is stored as an "Object."

Object storage, also known as object-based storage, manages data as objects. Each object includes the data, associated metadata, and a globally unique identifier.

Unlike file storage, there are no folders or directories in object storage. Instead, objects are organized into a flat address space, called a bucket in Amazon S3's terminology.

The unique identifier allows an object to be retrieved without needing to know the physical location of the data. Metadata can be customized, making object storage incredibly flexible.

Every object gets a UID (universal ID) and associated META data.

No Folders / SubFolders

For example, if you have an object with the key images/summer/beach.png in your bucket, Amazon S3 has no internal concept of the images or summer as separate entities—it simply sees the entire string images/summer/beach.png as the key for that object.

To store objects in S3, you must first define and create a bucket.

You can think of a bucket as a container for your data.

This bucket name must be unique, not just within the region you specify, but globally against all other S3 buckets, of which there are many millions.

Any object uploaded to your buckets is given a unique object key to identify it.

  • S3 bucket ownership is not transferable.

  • S3 bucket names should start with alphabets, and - is allowed in between.

  • An AWS account can have a maximum of 100 buckets.

More details

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/object-keys.html

Other types of Storage are

File Storage

Block Storage

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