What is Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)?

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)

• highly scalable durable, distributed object store
• for mission-critical and primary data storage
• geo redundant
• stored objects can be 1 byte to 5TB
• can store unlimited Objects
• can sustain the concurrent loss of data in two facilities
• designed for 99.999999999% (“11 nines”) durability per object and 99.99% availability over a one-year period

What can you store on S3?

• static web content
• video, photo
• clickstream data
• media transcoding
• snapshot for EBS volumes
• use Reduced Redundancy Storage (RRS) option for noncritical data (99.99% durability per object over a given year)

Pricing

Based on storage (per GB per month), data transfer in or out (per GB per month), and requests (per n thousand requests per month).

To upload or download large volume of data, you can use AWS Import/Export service.


Anti-Patterns

File system - S3 is a flat namespace; not for POSIX-compliant filesystem

Structured data with query - use SimpleDB to hold location (bucket name and key) of the object

Rapidly-changing data - use EBS or database