In this article, we will be covering the key basics of the AWS S3 bucket service and its use cases.

What is Cloud Storage

• Cloud storage is a web service where data can be stored, accessed, and quickly backed up on the internet
• More reliable, scalable, and secure

Types of AWS Storage Services

• Amazon Simple Storage Service – AWS S3 – Object-based Storage
• Amazon Elastic File System – AWS EFS – Distributed Network File System
• Amazon Elastic Block Store – AWS EBS – Storage designed for AWS EC2
• AWS Storage Gateway – On-premises & cloud storage
• Glacier – One of the S3 storage classes
• Snowball, Snowball Edge, Snowmobile for huge data process

What is an S3 Bucket?

• New users get 5GB of S3 standard storage free under AWS Free Tier for 12 Months
• Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance
• Customers of all sizes and industries can use Amazon S3 to store and protect any amount of data for a range of use cases, such as data lakes, websites, mobile applications, backup and restore, archive, enterprise applications, IoT devices, and big data analytics

S3 Key terms

• Buckets
  • Container for objects stored in Amazon S3
  • Any number of objects can be stored and can have up to 100 buckets in the AWS account
  • Organize the Amazon S3 namespace at the highest level
  • Identify the account responsible for storage and data transfer charges
• Objects
  • It consists of object data and metadata
  • Metadata is a set of name-value pairs that describe the object
  • Object can be identified by Key (object/file name) and version ID (if S3 Versioning enabled)
• Keys
  • Every object in a bucket has exactly one key
  • Object identified by combining bucket name, object key, and version ID (if S3 Versioning enabled)
  • For example, file name proposal.pdf then access URL will be like
    https://myspace-bucket.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/documents/proposal.pdf
myspace-bucket is the name of the bucket and documents / proposal.pdf is the key.
• S3 Versioning
  • You can use S3 Versioning to keep multiple variants of an object in the same bucket.
  • With S3 Versioning, preserve, retrieve, and restore every version of every object stored in buckets.
  • Easily recover from unintended user actions and application failures.

AWS S3 Benefits

• Durability: S3 provides 99.9999% durability
• Low cost: S3 storage classes are based on the frequency and immediacy required to access files, so it is lower in cost.
• Security: It has top-notch security with encryption features
• Flexibility: S3 is ideal for data storage, backup, archiving, disaster recovery, static website hosting, and much more.
• It has higher availability
• Pay for the storage you use

Use Cases

Following are some of the scenarios where S3 can be used.

• Host Static Website
• Backup CMS Data – CMS page, posts, files, tables, and plugins can be backup to an Amazon S3 account on schedule
• Downloadable content storage – This will help to boost the website’s performance. For example, site images or uploaded images can be stored.
• Archive
• Older backup files and logs can be archived in the bucket
• Can serve as a backup storage place

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