Amazon Simple Storage Service

Amazon S3 is a highly durable, scalable, and secure object storage service designed to store and retrieve any amount of data. As a developer, you’ll find that S3 is not only easy to use via the AWS SDKs, APIs, and CLI, but it’s also deeply integrated into many AWS workflows, making it a central component in modern, cloud-native application architectures.

Features of S3

What makes S3 particularly valuable is its durability and availability model. It is designed for 99.999999999% (11 nines) of data durability and 99.99% availability for the Standard storage class. This level of reliability is achieved by automatically distributing data across a minimum of three physically separated Availability Zones (AZs) within an AWS Region.

From a usage standpoint, S3 follows a flat namespace model organized around buckets and objects. A bucket acts as a top-level container for storing objects, while objects are composed of the actual data and their associated metadata. Each object is uniquely identified within a bucket by a key (essentially its file name).

S3 provides powerful features such as lifecycle management, event notifications, object lock, versioning, presigned URLs, CORS rules, server-side Encryption (SSE), and access control lists (ACLs), among others. These capabilities allow developers to automate workflows, enforce security, and optimize costs without managing infrastructure.

Lastly, S3 integrates natively with services like AWS Lambda, Amazon CloudFront, AWS CloudTrail, and AWS KMS. This makes it possible to build secure, responsive, and efficient event-driven applications on S3, without provisioning or managing any servers.

S3 lifecycle rules

S3’s storage classes give us the flexibility to optimize for cost depending on how frequently our data is accessed. Classes like ...