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Amazon S3

Score8.8 out of 10

352 Reviews and Ratings

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What is Amazon S3?

Amazon S3 is a cloud-based object storage service from Amazon Web Services. It's key features are storage management and monitoring, access management and security, data querying, and data transfer.

Categories & Use Cases

Key Features

Learn about the best (and worst!) features Amazon S3 has to offer, as determined by TrustRadius' reviewers.
Based on 352 ratings of Amazon S3's features
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Top Performing Features

  • Encryption

    Data encryption to ensure that data is safe while being backed-up

    Category average: 8.7

  • Continuous data protection

    Data is backed up every time a change is made, and the system can be restored to any previous saved version

    Category average: 9.2

  • Retention options

    Provision of best-practice and customizable retention policies with reporting

    Category average: 9.2

Areas for Improvement

  • Ransomware Recovery

    The ability to recovery data in a timely manner after a ransomware attack

    Category average: 8.8

  • Operational reporting and analytics

    The product provides insights and analytics to help keep data secure

    Category average: 8.7

  • Management dashboard

    Web-based dashboard allowing configuration and monitoring of all backups

    Category average: 9

Reviews

What users are saying about Amazon S3.
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Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) great use for a data lake implementation

Incentivized
Verified User
Employee in Engineering (1001-5000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

At my organization, we primarily use Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) as a catch all storage solution. In particular, we have built our entire data lake around it, so we have “raw layer” buckets, “clean layer” buckets and so on. There are of course other uses, such as simple “data dump” buckets but in general we aim to use Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) as our main storage solution.

Pros

  • Bucket name uniqueness, as it forces to implement some rudimentary form of naming organization
  • Flexibility in the buckets management: policies, version control, etc
  • Available APIs: it is possible to interact with Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) quite easily thanks to the various APIs to read/write/update the objects

Cons

  • UI: it could be a bit more intuitive, especially when there are deleted elements
  • Filter on the prefix (partial) name: in a lot of cases, the precise full path and name of the object must be know to find it
  • It’s very easy to have too broad policies or completely lock yourself out from a bucket, it would be nice to have some guardrails in place

Return on Investment

  • Affordable: the entire data lake and most of our raw data is on Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) and it’s not the most expensive feature from AWS we use
  • Easy to onboard to: we are aiming for 100% of data being synced to Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) in some form, so that data is located in a single place
  • Good integration with other systems, reduced overall costs for us and time to reach a decision

Usability

Other Software Used

Apache Airflow, Apache Spark, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)

Unmatched scalable and reliable service for object storage easy to store access and manage data securely.

Incentivized
Verified User
Manager in Research & Development (51-200 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We utilize Amazon S3 in multiple ways, a few of which are listed below: 1. Hosting static websites, React or Angular application builds, and exposing them using AWS CloudFront. 2. Storing media files like images, PDF, DOC files, and various other formats. 3. Backing up databases. 4. Storing debug and audit logs, which are historical. 5. Setting up serverless triggers using Lambda for lengthy, time-consuming processes.

Pros

  • We're storing all customer provided files to avoid storage on server.
  • Setting up lambda triggers for files that are provided us for processing.
  • Backing up logs for future.
  • Creating database snapshots for disaster recovery.

Cons

  • If the bucket is private, then it cannot contain any public objects. At least there must be some property to make a few objects public.

Return on Investment

  • From day one, we had deployment using S3 only, and we never encountered any issues with it. Just follow the right strategy.
  • Overall cost of storing and reading file is ok for us.

Usability

Other Software Used

Postman

Amazon S3

Incentivized
Verified User
Consultant in Engineering (5001-10,000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use s3 buckets for having terraform state file management, keeping cloudwatch log group logs, keeping website static content, keeping cost optimization reports. The s3 bucket are helpful because it can hold any type of object and which can be automatically deleted whenever it is not required using the lifecycle management.

Pros

  • Keeping cloudwatch logs
  • Keeping pipeline artifacts
  • Keeping infra as code state files
  • Keeping any type of object like txt, media, logs

Cons

  • Searching for a object within the multiple buckets can be improved
  • An s3 explorer can be handy to navigate the buckets and objects

Return on Investment

  • S3 helped in keeping backup of the platform to be used in case of disaster recovery
  • For keeping some static content for web hosting

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Google Cloud Storage and Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)

Other Software Used

AWS Lambda, Amazon CloudWatch

Great storage engine for all your AWS needs

Incentivized
Nir LevyView profile
VP R&D DevOps and Products in Engineering at Zoomd Technologies (51-200 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are using Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) as our main storage for static files, saved reports, and short and long-term backups. Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) has many different storage types that allow us to optimize our data storage spend quite well, but unfortunately not to the fullest. With the built in web access, and good integration with CloudFront we are also able to serve media to the world with a simple and low-cost solution. Having file-level access control is also a major plus that we utilize often.

Pros

  • Long term cost effective storage
  • Bucket, folder and file level access control
  • Publish files and folders to the web
  • Integrate with many other AWS services

Cons

  • More storage types would allow for better cost scenarios
  • An in-place compression and decompression functionality would be helpful

Return on Investment

  • A trusted storage for our production data
  • Keeps things simple
  • Well understood and accepted in the community

Alternatives Considered

Google Cloud Storage

Other Software Used

Amazon CloudFront, Apache Kafka, SingleStore

The best cloud option for object storage!

Incentivized
Fabricio Zubelli
DevOps Engineer in Engineering at Kea (51-200 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We leverage Amazon S3 capabilities to a multitude of scenarios. We store audio recording files for our application, we use it as a storage backend for our vault application and we also use it to store analytics data for Redshift to consume from. Amazon S3 is always something we look at when solving business problems that requires storing data because of its ease of use and scalability with affordable price. it is also easy to share data externally and to integrate with applications. It provides reliable storage scalability for analytics and business data as well.

Pros

  • Scalability
  • Cold storage and data management
  • Integrations
  • Security and compliance for you stored data
  • Cost effective data storage

Cons

  • Versioning management is hard and not straightforward
  • Folder renaming
  • Cost estimation for large scale organizations can get hard
  • Reporting and monitoring of granular data is not available
  • Data transfer cost could be a nightmare

Return on Investment

  • Amazon S3 is around 80% cheaper than storing in a DB
  • Implementation time is approximately 90% faster than a DB
  • It enabled a lot of out company's database and application backups with replication on top of it
  • Made it easier to develop applications that need a reliable scalable cheap storage for objects

Alternatives Considered

Cloudflare, DigitalOcean Spaces and Google Cloud Storage

Other Software Used

Cloudflare, Cloudflare Zero Trust Services, HashiCorp Vault