Amazon Simple Storage Service
Every organization is eager to be an industry leader and to be a leader, smart work is required. Data handling is something that some organizations ignore and your first smart move in growing your organization would be choosing a dedicated server. A server that is secure, fast, cost-effective, and also easy to use. Wait! It sounds like Amazon S3 (Amazon Simple Storage Service).
Competition is increasing day-by-day and your organization must be ready to handle the data processing at a large scale. This is where Amazon S3 plays an important role in the storage and retrieval of data.
No organization would ever want to lose its user base due to the latency faced by its users in using the website or any other product. You must read this article for a life-saving solution to all kinds of problems related to the backend.
The content of this post includes :
- What is Amazon S3?
- Reliability of Amazon S3
- Recent updates and added features of Amazon S3
- Plans & Pricing
- Creating, Configuring, and Working with Amazon S3 buckets
- How to work on S3
What is Amazon S3?
Amazon Simple Storage Service which is famously known as Amazon S3 is a service that provides object storage or retrieval of any amount of data through a web interface. Introduced by Amazon in 2006 in the United States while launched in Europe in the year 2007.
We consider 2020 as a devil’s year but Amazon doesn’t care about any devil when it comes to innovation. Last year Amazon launched a lot of cool features in Amazon S3 like the feature that would help you easily manage, secure your data, optimize costs, or use S3 in new ways.
Amazon S3 has a very simple interface and also it is very easy to store or retrieve data, all you need to do is choose a region (which is a separate geographic area, choose the closest one to you), create a bucket and start storing data.
As claimed by Amazon, S3 offers industry leading performance, availability, durability and security at very low cost.
Now, you already have an idea about Amazon S3. It’s time to know about the benefits of using it.
Reliability of Amazon S3
- Security: “Security” is the most crucial topic when it comes to ‘Data handling’. Amazon S3 buckets implement security by enforcing a certain set of rules and permissions, which prevents any unauthorized access to your data i.e. it provides full control over how, where, and by whom data may be accessed. Amazon S3 also supports the transfer of data on SSL.
- Availability of the data: Hosting files on Amazon S3 gives you 99.99% availability of data with protection against all kinds of failures including network, power and hardware failure. It automatically creates multiple replicas(whose rules can be defined by the user) of your data so that your precious data is never lost.
- Ease of data migration: Amazon S3 also provides the option to import or export your precious data to a physical device or to a network. You get multiple options for cost-effective cloud data migration at a very large scale and it is also very simple to do this with S3.
- Integration: Amazon S3 is easy to integrate with the services or technologies other than that are provided by AWS.. You can directly embed S3 with various services providers. Like you can integrate S3 with ‘notification’ service provider, database, security platforms such as KMS or IAM and various computing platforms.
- Simplicity of use: Amazon S3 has a web management console, mobile apps and APIs that allow organizations to link or integrate third party technologies with their platform and start using them within no time. Amazon S3 is designed to simplify functions, it also has a very user friendly web interface which cuts out the usual hard work of maintaining security.
- Cost Effective: If you host your own server, you have to bear with the huge expenses like maintenance, security and other costs. The price is fixed, whether you use it or not you have to pay for it. But that isn’t the case with Amazon S3. You only pay for what you use. Which in itself is a very low price starting from $0.0125 / GB. In addition the cost of migration of data is also reduced. Also some
Recent updates and added features of Amazon S3
Amazon continued its legacy of introducing new & cool features in its services, making Amazon S3 even more reliable to use.
In 2020, Amazon introduced three new features under S3, which were in action by October. The new features were:
- Object Ownership
- Bucket Owner Condition
- Copy API via Access Points
Object Ownership
Object Ownership is a set of permission that can be set while creating a new object within a bucket, to enforce the transfer of new object ownership to the bucket owner.
Bucket Owner Conditions
Bucket Owner Condition allows bucket owners to confirm the ownership when they create a new object or perform other S3 operations.
Copy API via Access Points
Amazon S3 Access Points now support the Copy API, allowing customers to copy data to and from access points within an AWS Region. S3 Access Points simplify managing data access at scale for applications using shared data sets on S3, such as usage and transaction logs for analytics, and post-processing. S3 Access Points are unique hostnames that you can create to enforce distinct and precise permissions and network controls for any request made through the access point
Plans and pricing [With real-life examples of companies using AWS S3]
‘Pay for what you use’ , is the ideology AWS believes in. Just like electricity, water or even like your Netflix subscription, you have to pay for the services as long as you use them, without the need of contracts and unnecessary requirements of licenses. Moreover, once you stop using them, you don’t have to pay anything.
In this case of AWS S3, the cost incurred depends on the size of objects you store in buckets, how long you store them for and the storage class you use.
The following are the kinds of storage that AWS offers:
- S3 Standard- This can store any type of data which can be accessed whenever required and hence, it is a general purpose storage. Since it has low latency and high throughput, it can be very much used for cloud applications, websites, gaming applications, etc.
- S3 Standard with Infrequent Access- It works best with data that is needed for long life and is accessed in milliseconds. Moreover, it is cheaper than the normal standard storage.
- S3 One Zone with Infrequent Access- It is mainly used as a secondary storage, more like a cost-effective replicated storage of another AWS Region using the S3 Cross-Region Replication
- S3 Intelligent-Tiering- Are you not sure what storage to choose? Confused whether to go for an Infrequent access plan or for a normal one? Well, no need to worry, because this is the only cloud storage class that can automatically save costs by observing access patterns and then doing its job by shifting the objects to infrequent access tier if they are not accessed for more than 30 days.
- S3 Glacier- Appropriate for data archiving, this low cost storage class is quite secure and durable.
- S3 Glacier Deep Archive- This is the cheapest storage class provided by AWS which provides long term preservation. Data here is usually accessed once or twice in a year and can also be used as a backup in case of a disaster. Moreover, objects stored in Glacier Deep Archive are replicated across at least three AWS’ geographically available zones.
For detailed pricing according to your region, please click here
Several notable companies are making use of AWS S3. Siemens AG, a German MNC, utilizes S3 to collect about 6 TB of log data every single day, to later analyze them to find the best solutions for detected threats.
Ryanair, Europe’s biggest airline, makes use of AWS S3 Glacier deep archive and saves costs up to 65% in backup costs
Another company called 3M Health Insurance Systems, an American MNC, also utilizes AWS S3 for application data storage and AWS EC2 instances to run its application.
To learn more about AWS EC2, you can visit here .
Creating, Configuring, and Working with Amazon S3 buckets
As you might have guessed by now, we use buckets to store our data in S3. More specifically, objects are stored in buckets. And one good thing about this, you can store any number of objects in a bucket. AWS S3 ensures uniqueness so you cannot create a bucket with the same name even if it belongs to another AWS region.
When you create a bucket, you must give it a name and a region. Make sure to adhere to these naming rules and choose the region which is geographically closest to you to optimize latency and minimize costs. Once a bucket is created, you cannot change its name and region. However, you can delete it and that would make your bucket name free to use for anyone. By default, AWS S3 provides you 100 buckets which you can increase by submitting a service limit increase.
Coding is not your cup of tea? Don’t worry, AWS to the rescue! Using the UI console, you can access your bucket, create, empty, delete it and perform almost all bucket operations without writing a single line of code.
However, if you are die-hard coder, there are ways to access your bucket programmatically:
- Virtual-hosted-style access- here, the bucket name is part of the domain name in the URL. The format for the same is:
https://bucket-name.s3.Region.amazonaws.com.cn/key name
- Path-style access- For this kind of access, use the following format:
https://s3.Region.amazonaws.com.cn/bucket-name/key name
- We can also access buckets indirectly through access points. However, S3 supports only virtual-host-style addressing for which we can use the following format:
https://AccessPointName-AccountId.s3-accesspoint.region.amazonaws.com
- We can also access the bucket using:
S3://bucket-name/key-name
Creation of S3 buckets
When emptying a bucket, we clear the content of the bucket but we get to keep the bucket.
Deleting, on the other hand, will not only clear the objects but also wipe off the bucket from existence. In other words, anyone else can use the name you used, making it unavailable for future use. Please make sure to visit this before deleting your buckets.
How to work on S3
At the end of these details, we are adding a small YouTube video for your reference for a clearer concept formation. The video below basically describes the detailed process of how to work on S3
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