AWS S3 (Simple Storage Service)

What is AWS S3?

Amazon Web Services provides a large number of cloud services and currently is the world-leading cloud service provider. Out of all the services we have our S3 service, which is an Object Level Storage Service. In S3 we can save all types of objects(files) e.g. Image, Videos, Documents, Excel Sheets, PDFs, etc, and all these files can be made available to the public. Each object is assigned a Global Unique ID. The Object Unique ID is a unique identifier for the object. Object storage cannot be mounted as a drive.

Some Key Points of S3:

• S3 is an Object-Based Storage.
• S3 has a distributed data-store architecture, where objects are redundantly stored in multiple locations but in the same Region.
• Objects are stored in a container which is called a Bucket in S3.
• A Bucket is a flat container of objects.

• Max Capacity of a bucket is 5TB.
• You can create folders in a bucket (option available through the console), but you cannot create a nested bucket.
• Bucket Ownership is non-transferable.
• You can have up to 100 Buckets per account (may expand on request).

S3 Bucket Versioning:

• Bucket Versioning is an S3 Bucket Sub-Resource used to protect against object deletion or overwrites.
• Versioning can also be used for data retention and archive.
• Once you enable versioning on a bucket, it cannot be disabled however it can be suspended.
• When enabled versioning will protect existing and new objects, and maintain their versions as they are updated.
• You will be charged for all S3 storage costs for all objects versions stored.
• Versioning is applied to all objects in a bucket and not partially applied.
• If you have a bucket that is already versioned and then you decide to suspend the versioning then all the existing object versions will remain as it is, there is no impact on objects that are already versioned.
• After the suspension of versioning, all the new objects will have Version ID “NULL” and if the same key name is used to store another object then it will override the existing object.
• An object deletion in a suspended versioning bucket will only delete the object with ID “NULL”.

S3 Bucket Versioning — MFA Delete:

• MFA Delete (multi-factor authentication delete) is a versioning feature that adds an additional layer of security to the buckets and objects in case your account is compromised.

Copying S3 Objects:

The copy operation creates a copy object that is already stored in AWS S3. You can create a copy of your object up to 5GB in a single atomic operation, however, to copy an object greater than 5GB you must use the multipart upload API.

S3 Multipart Upload:

• It is used to upload the object in multiple parts and these parts are uploaded parallelly but in random order.
• Multipart uploaded is recommended for objects for object sizes of 100MB and above.

S3 Storage and types:

• Amazon S3-Standard
• S3-IA (Infrequent Access)
• S3 Intelligent Tiering
• S3 One-Zone IA
• Amazon S3 Glacier
• Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive.

In this small article, I have tried to give you a birds-eye view of the Amazon S3 Service. Depending on your interest, you can further deep dive into all the above-mentioned points. I will be posting a detailed article on all the storage types so keep checking and do follow me for regular posts on AWS and Devops.