Amazon Web Services provides the following AWS Cloud Storage services and features.
Among the aforementioned storage services, Amazon S3 also known as Amazon Simple Storage Service provides secure, durable, highly scalable object storage at a very low cost.
S3 service has the following main features
- can retrieve any amount of data at any time from anywhere on the web
- can write, read, and delete objects containing from 0 to 5 TB of data
- allowing concurrent read or write access to data
On top of that, Amazon S3 offers a range of storage classes designed for different use cases including following:
- Amazon S3 Standard, for general-purpose storage of frequently accessed data
- Amazon S3 Standard-Infrequent Access(Standard IA), for long-lived, but less frequently accessed data
- Amazon Glacier, for low-cost archival data
Four Common Usage Patterns for Amazon S3
1.Store and distributed static web content and media
- each object in Amazon S3 has a unique HTTP URL
- Origin store for a content delivery network(CDN) like Amazon CloudFront
- Well suited for hosting web content that required bandwidth for addressing extreme demand spikes.
- No storage provisioning is required
- works well for websites hosing data-intensive, user-generated content like Video and photo-sharing sites.
2. Host Entire static websites
- serve as storage for static HTML files, images, videos, and client-side scripts in formats such as Javascript.
3. Data Store for computation and large-scale analytics
- examples: Financial transaction analysis, clickstream analytics, and media transcoding.
- Because of the horizontal scalability, you can access your data from multiple computing nodes concurrently without being constrained by a single connection.
4. Solution for backup and archiving of critical data.
- can easily move cold data to Amazon Glacier using lifecycle management rules on data stored in S3.
- can automatically copy objects across S3 buckets in different AWS Regions asynchronously by using Cross-Region Replication, providing Disaster Recovery solutions for business continuity.
Other Storage Needs
Performance
- Fast: access to Amazon S3 from Amazon Ec2 in the same region
- Scale storage, requests, and numbers of users to support extremely large number of web-scale applications.
- Aggregate throughput scales to rates that far exceed what any single server can generate and or consume even in multiple threads/applications/clients access.
- Offers multipart upload to upload a single large object(over 100MB) as a set of parts.
- Multipart upload helps you upload a single object in parallel and restart the upload of smaller parts instead of restarting the upload of the entire large object.
- Can speed up access to relevant data with the help of Amazon CloudSearch, DynamoDB, RDS. In these scenarios, S3 stores the actual information and the search engine or database serves and the repository for associated metadata.
- Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration enables fast, easy, and secure transfer of files over long distances between your client and your Amazon S3 bucket. This can be enabled on an Amazon S3 bucket, and it leverages Amazon CloudFront globally distributed edge locations to route traffic to your Amazon S3 bucket over an Amazon-optimized network path.
Durability and Availability
Amazon S3 Standard storage and Standard-IA storage provides high levels of data durability and availability by automatically and synchronously storing your data across both multiple devices and facilities within your selected geographical region.
- Error correction is built-in
- No single points of failure
- sustain the concurrent loss of data in two facilities, well suited to serve as the primary data storage for mission-critical data
- 11 nines durability per object, 4 nines availability over a once-year period.
- cross-region replication can be enabled to copy objects across buckets in different AWS Regions asynchronously.
Scalability and Elasticity
- Virtually unlimited number of files in any bucket.
- Virtually unlimited number of bytes
- Automatically manage scaling and distributing redundant copies of your information to other servers in other locations in the same Region.
Security
- Fine-grained control of access to S3 resources with encryption supported.
- can manage access to Amazon S3 by granting other AWS accounts and users permissions to perform the resource operations by writing an access policy.
- can protect S3 data by using server-side encryption in which you request S3 to encrypt your object before it’s written to disks in data centers and decrypt it when you download the object or by using client-side encryption.
- protect data in transit by using SSL or client-side encryption.
- with versioning, can easily recover from unintended user actions and application failures.
- MFA delete for a bucket requires two forms of authentication: AWS account credentials plus a six-digit code from a physical or virtual token device
- Access Logging option can be enabled to track requests: access log provides details about requester, bucket name, request time, request action, response status, error code.
Interfaces
- provides standards-based REST web service application program interfaces for both management and data operations.
- APIs allow for storing objects in uniquely named buckets(top-level folders)
- Each object must have unique object key(file name) that serves as a identifier for the object within that bucket.
- can emulate a file system hierarchy by creating object key name that correspond to the full path name of each file.
- Notification feature to receive notifications when certain events happen in your bucket
- can publish events when an object is uploaded or deleted.
- Notifications can be issued to Amazon Simple notification Service topics, Amazon Simple Queue Service queues, and AWS Lambda functions.
Cost Model
- Pay only for the storage you actually use
- no minimum fee
- no setup cost
- Three pricing components: storage(per GB per Month), data transfer in or out (per GB per month), and requests(per 1000 requests per month).
- For new customers, Free tier( 5GB storage, 20,000 get requests, 2,000 put requests, and 15 GB of data transfer out each month for one year) is provided.
- additional data transfer fees for S3 Transfer Acceleration on a bucket.
