What is Amazon S3?

amazon s3, benefits of amazon s3, usecases that companies use for amazon s3, amazon s3 storage classes

WHAT IS AMAZON S3?

Amazon S3 is one of AWS’s most popular services. S3 stands for simple cloud storage service and AWS launched S3 in 2006. It is designed for very high durability which means the file once you get it out there it is not going to get deleted accidentally or it is not going to get destroyed. The high rate of durability means that your files are going to be very safe. You can tier the storage to lower the cost. There is different storage class that is available and it is very effective with managing costs. You can get five gigabytes of storage included with the free tier for one year. So that is one reason to pick up the free tier with AWS you can get some free storage.

What are the benefits of Amazon S3?

You can easily scale for massive amounts of storage there is no limit to the amount of information that you can store up. And it is very flexible and easy to use.

A large number of storage classes are also available to support many different usage scenarios.

Can be easily configured to replicate data into multiple regions. So if you want to cache data in many regions around the world and can easily set up to do things.

You can set up all kinds of workflow and data flow scenarios for archiving.

You also have programmatic access to support online systems and processing. So if you are writing an online web application and you want to have access to highly durable storage that is available. You can use S3 for that and there's a wealth of API or application program interface support for all kinds of functions within Amazon S3. So it is a very flexible system. It is easy to get going and this is one of the areas if your company or you looking to onboard into cloud computing storage is a great place to start because it's easy to get started. It is very cost-effective and you can migrate slowly over time and so those on-premise storage issues that you might easily move into a cloud. so a great use case for one of the first things for onboarding a company to the cloud.

What are some of the common use cases that companies use for S3?

Backup and restore is a good use case for S3. You can start early backup maybe in a higher class of storage. And then archive it later to make it much cheaper.

You can use it for disaster recovery. So you have a hybrid cloud implementation you have an on-premise data center you can stage a lot of your data up in the cloud in case you have a disaster locally then you can roll over to the cloud where you have your backup.

You can use it for archiving.

You can also use it for data lakes and big data analytics.

Hybrid cloud storage, for example, you may have some storage on-premise and then stage that up to the cloud. So you can have a hybrid situation with your storage.

Cloud-native applications if you are developing an application you may want to have access to your data in the cloud.

Hosting static websites is one of the great features you can have with S3 is you can very easily configure it to host a static website and it is very cost-effective to host a website in Amazon S3.

Detailed Use Case

In this case, a user uploads some data to a website and that website will push the data programmatically into an S3 bucket and a bucket is an autonomous unit that S3 uses to store files. When you define a bucket you can define the class of service the region to operate in and some of the other attributes of it as one of the things about defining an S3 bucket is it has to have a unique name for you to create that bucket. In this case, once the data is stored in the bucket it is going to trigger a lambda function to compress the data and add some metadata to the database. And finally, that lambda function is going to send an email notification to the user.

S3 Storage Classes

As far as storage classes, there are many different storage classes.

S3 Standard – It is used for frequently accessed data.

S3 Intelligent-Tiring – It is designed for automatic cost savings. It is designed to kind of automatically pick the best storage class for you that is the best for what you are using it. So it kind of automatically shifts that storage class to the best economic access for you.

S3 Standard-1A – It is for data that is less frequently accessed

S3 Standard Zone 1A – It is for data that is less frequently accessed.

The lowest cost storage class on amazon S3 is S3 Glacier.

S3 Glacier Deep Dive – The low-cost storage class and supports long-term retention. The difference between those is the retrieval time and you want to use these for archival type purposes where you rarely want the data. and it takes a fairly long time to access data from these archival storages.

Start with Amazon S3 standard move into the archival services and as you get deeper into applications you will start moving to the infrequent access to fine-tune your cost. Then you know how to quantitatively get to the differences of these storage classes.

Conclusion

Amazon S3 is a complete cloud storage solution. It offers low cost and high performance and there are many different storage classes are available to support different use cases. There are also many APIs that allow you to have programmatic S3 from other services and you can use it in a workflow for end-to-end solutions. So it is not a matter of having a cloud drive that is parked up there it does offer a wealth of different services. And you can integrate these into end-to-end solutions for users.