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.