Amazon S3

Amazon S3 or Amazon Simple Storage Service is a service offered by Amazon Web Service (AWS) that provides object storage and it’s a main building blocks of AWS, widely popular and deserves its own section. Three main aspect before jump into storages.

Buckets

• Amazon S3 allows people to store objects (files) in ‘Buckets’ (directories).
• Buckets must have a globally unique name.
• Naing convention: No uppercase, No underscore, 3–63 characters long, Not an IP (Internet Protocol), Must start with lowercase letter or number.

Objects

• Objects (files) have a key.
• The key is the full path.
• E.g.: s3://my-bucket/my_file.txt
• There is no concept of ‘directories’ within buckets.
• Just keys with very long names that contain slashes (“/”).

Versioning

• You can version your files in Amazon S3.
• Same key overwrite will increment the ‘version’: 1, 2, 3….
• It is best practice to version your buckets.
• Easy roll back to previous version.
• Protect against unintended deletes (ability to restore a version).

S3 Storage Classes

1) S3 Standard — General Purpose

• High durability (99.999999999%) of objects across multiple availability zone.
• If you store 10,000,000 objects with Amazon S3, you can on average expect to incur a loss of single object once every 10,000 years.
• Best to use for: Big Data Analytics, Mobile & Gaming Applications, Content Distribution.

2) S3 Standard — Infrequent Access (IA)

• Suitable for data that is less frequently accessed, but requires rapid access when needed.
• High durability (99.9999999%) of objects across multiple availability zones.
• 99.9% availability.
• Low cost compared to Amazon S3 Standard.
• Best to use for: As a data store for disaster recovery, backups.

3) S3 One Zone — Infrequent Access (IA)

• Same as Standard IA but data is stored in a single availability zone.
• High durability (99.9999999%) of objects in a single availability zone.
• Data lost when availability zone is destroyed.
• 99.5% availability.
• Low cost compared to Standard IA (by 20%).
• Best to use for: Storing secondary backup copies of on-premise data, or storing data you can recreate

4) Amazon Glacier & Glacier Deep Archive

Amazon Glacier Instant Retrieval

• Millisecond retrieval, good for data accessed once a quarter.
• Minimum storage duration of 90 days.

Amazon Glacier Flexible Retrieval

• Expedited (1 to 5 minutes), Standard (3 to 5 hours), Bulk (5 to 12 hours).
• Minimum storage duration of 90 days.

Amazon Glacier Deep Archive — For Long Term Storage — Cheaper

• Standard (12 hours), Bulk (48 hours).
• Minimum storage duration of 180 days.

5) Intelligent Tiering

• Automatically moves objects between two access tiers based on changing access patterns.
• Designed for durability of 99.999999999% of objects across multiple availability zones.
• Designed for durability of 99.999999999% of objects across multiple availability zones.

S3 Lifecycle Rules

Transition actions:

It defines when objects are transitioned to another storage class.

eg:

• Move to objects to Standard IA class 60 days after creation.
• Move to glacier for archiving after 6 months.

Expiration actions:

Configure objects to expire (delete) after some time.

eg:

• Access log files can be set to delete after a 365 days.