Welcome to Day 61 of the #100DaysOfDevOps Challenge! Today we will deep dive into Overview and Features of AWS S3
What is Cloud Storage?
Cloud storage is a web service where your data can be stored, accessed, and quickly backed up by users on the internet. It is more reliable, scalable, and secure than traditional on-premises storage systems.
Cloud storage is offered in two models:
Pay only for what you use
Pay on a monthly basis
Now, let’s have a look at the different types of storage services offered by AWS.
Types of AWS Storage
AWS offers the following services for storage purposes:
Storage services offered by Amazon
We’ll eventually take an in-depth look at the S3 service. But before we get to that, let’s have a look at how things were before we had the option of using Amazon S3.
Before AWS S3
Organizations had a difficult time finding, storing, and managing all of your data. Not only that, running applications, delivering content to customers, hosting high traffic websites, or backing up emails and other files required a lot of storage. Maintaining the organization’s repository was also expensive and time-consuming for several reasons. Challenges included the following:
Having to purchase hardware and software components
Requiring a team of experts for maintenance
A lack of scalability based on your requirements
Data security requirements
These are the issues AWS S3 would eventually solve. So, what exactly is AWS S3?
What is AWS S3?
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) provides object storage, which is built for storing and recovering any amount of information or data from anywhere over the internet. It provides this storage through a web services interface. While designed for developers for easier web-scale computing, it provides 99.999999999 percent durability and 99.99 percent availability of objects. It can also store computer files up to 5 terabytes in size.
AWS S3 Benefits
Some of the benefits of AWS S3 are:
Durability: S3 provides 99.999999999 percent durability.
Low cost: S3 lets you store data in a range of “storage classes.” These classes are based on the frequency and immediacy you require in accessing files.
Scalability: S3 charges you only for what resources you actually use, and there are no hidden fees or overage charges. You can scale your storage resources to easily meet your organization’s ever-changing demands.
Availability: S3 offers 99.99 percent availability of objects
Security: S3 offers an impressive range of access management tools and encryption features that provide top-notch security.
Flexibility: S3 is ideal for a wide range of uses like data storage, data backup, software delivery, data archiving, disaster recovery, website hosting, mobile applications, IoT devices, and much more.
Simple data transfer: You don’t have to be an IT genius to execute data transfers on S3. The service revolves around simplicity and ease of use.
These are compelling reasons to sign up for S3. Now, let’s move on and have a look at some of the major components of the AWS S3 storage service.
Features of Amazon S3
Storage classes
Amazon S3 offers a range of storage classes designed for different use cases. For example, you can store mission-critical production data in S3 Standard or S3 Express One Zone for frequent access, save costs by storing infrequently accessed data in S3 Standard-IA or S3 One Zone-IA, and archive data at the lowest costs in S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval, S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval, and S3 Glacier Deep Archive.
Amazon S3 Express One Zone is a high-performance, single-zone Amazon S3 storage class that is purpose-built to deliver consistent, single-digit millisecond data access for your most latency-sensitive applications. S3 Express One Zone is the lowest latency cloud object storage class available today, with data access speeds up to 10x faster and with request costs 50 percent lower than S3 Standard. S3 Express One Zone is the first S3 storage class where you can select a single Availability Zone with the option to co-locate your object storage with your compute resources, which provides the highest possible access speed. Additionally, to further increase access speed and support hundreds of thousands of requests per second, data is stored in a new bucket type: an Amazon S3 directory bucket. For more information, see What is S3 Express One Zone? and Directory buckets.
You can store data with changing or unknown access patterns in S3 Intelligent-Tiering, which optimizes storage costs by automatically moving your data between four access tiers when your access patterns change. These four access tiers include two low-latency access tiers optimized for frequent and infrequent access, and two opt-in archive access tiers designed for asynchronous access for rarely accessed data.
For more information, see Using Amazon S3 storage classes. For more information about S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval, see the Amazon S3 Glacier Developer Guide.
Storage management
Amazon S3 has storage management features that you can use to manage costs, meet regulatory requirements, reduce latency, and save multiple distinct copies of your data for compliance requirements.
S3 Lifecycle – Configure a lifecycle configuration to manage your objects and store them cost effectively throughout their lifecycle. You can transition objects to other S3 storage classes or expire objects that reach the end of their lifetimes.
S3 Object Lock – Prevent Amazon S3 objects from being deleted or overwritten for a fixed amount of time or indefinitely. You can use Object Lock to help meet regulatory requirements that require write-once-read-many (WORM) storage or to simply add another layer of protection against object changes and deletions.
S3 Replication – Replicate objects and their respective metadata and object tags to one or more destination buckets in the same or different AWS Regions for reduced latency, compliance, security, and other use cases.
S3 Batch Operations – Manage billions of objects at scale with a single S3 API request or a few clicks in the Amazon S3 console. You can use Batch Operations to perform operations such as Copy, Invoke AWS Lambda function, and Restore on millions or billions of objects.