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Amazon S3

Amazon S3

Overview

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.

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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.

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  • No setup fee

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  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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Product Details

What is Amazon S3?

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is a cloud-based object storage service from Amazon Web Services. It offers scalability, data availability, security, and performance. It provides great utility for storage management and monitoring, access management and security, data querying, and data transfer.

It is suitable for businesses or organizations of any size to store and protect any amount of data for a range of use cases, such as websites, mobile applications, backup and restore, archive, enterprise applications, IoT devices, and big data analytics. Amazon S3 provides management features for organizing data and configuring access controls to meet business, organizational, and compliance requirements.


Amazon S3 Technical Details

Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

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.

Reviewers rate Support Rating highest, with a score of 9.8.

The most common users of Amazon S3 are from Small Businesses (1-50 employees).
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Reviews and Ratings

(332)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-25 of 68)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
January 18, 2024

A true view on S3

Pankaj Choudhary | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Where we want the quick responses and we have to manage too many files then we can use the S3, But if we are not processing the files to many times its not required to use the S3. If we want to use a file from different servers then its a very good option to store the file at a central point like S3 and use it from the different servers.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is perfect and the defacto choice for AWS native workloads. Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) has every need covered and is extremely powerful when using the CLI. With all the options offered for cost/speed/availability it is almost impossible to beat Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service).
The only time Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is less appropriate is when working with on prem workloads. To have EC2 or another AWS service reach back on prem to get or put data is simply an inefficient architecture.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Amazon S3 [(Simple Storage Service)] is best to host static resources for apps and sites like audio files and images. It is good to store backups as external storage. Amazon S3 is not appropriate and expensive to host dynamic site or app. In that case dedicated server would be better.
Matthew Gardner | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
S3 is a VERY quick way to get up and running. Very simple for developers to use and have work. With the rest of Amazon's offerings, it can scale to be distributed via CDN, replicated, etc. If you need non-developers to store/update, though, this may not be the solution for you. The UI is far too confusing and easy to make a mistake on, and if you use CloudFront you need to invalidate, etc. with new uploads which is hard to grasp as a non-developer. As well, other companies have far less expensive solutions which scale just as well.
Peter Hamilton | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
If you have data you may someday need but don't have immediate high volume access patterns, S3 is great.
Serving images and static content via s3 works very well and provides smoke performance (and can be coupled with CloudFront for distribution if necessary). Do not treat s3 like a general-purpose key-value store. Do not try to coordinate or create consensus using s3.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Amazon S3 is a great service to safely backup your data where redundancy is guaranteed and the cost is fair. We use Amazon S3 for data that we backup and hope we never need to access but in the case of a catastrophic or even small slip of the finger with the delete command we know our data and our client's data is safely backed up by Amazon S3.

Transferring data into Amazon S3 is free but transferring data out has an associated, albeit low, cost per GB. This needs to be kept in mind if you plan on transferring out a lot of data frequently. There may be other cost effective options although Amazon S3 prices are really low per GB. Transferring 150TB would cost approximately $50 per month.
Sam Othman | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
For archiving old data that is infrequently accessed it is perfect. You can choose to let it go into cold/glacier storage which saves even further costs but at the expense of accessibility. I like that you can set access rules to automatically move it to the next storage tier after a certain amount of time that it has not been accessed.

I also use it a lot with PHP via the API. We have some custom in-house applications that have a fair amount of data uploaded into them. S3 has been a perfect solution to store these files, taking the load off web servers and never having issues with running out of storage.
Adam Lauer | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • We use S3 as an entry point (landing zone for data). We can then transform (normalize) the data and store it again.
  • S3 has great services built around automating tasks to be done when an object is updated/created/deleted.
  • S3 has built-in replication for back up and disaster recovery.
It is not great that some of it features require you to think about how you want to store your data. For example to get the cheapest usage it is recommended to use less objects with greater size instead of many objects of tiny size.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
ResellerIncentivized
It is best when you want to store a lot of data like backups, data lakes, logs, etc. It saves a lot of money. It also provides archiving facility. You can also enable versioning on objects which can help in versioning builds and artefacts. You can use it to enable events to do something upon data creation or deletion on it. Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is a great service that serves a lot of purposes. You can use it to store data in many formats like jpg, gzip, txt, csv, parquet, avro, etc.
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) shouldn't be used if you're looking for storage like RDBMS or NoSQL.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) well fit since it is an item stockpiling administration for the cloud. You can store any measure of information and access it anyplace on the planet. You may quit [beng] contingent upon hard drives for your web applications, and begin utilizing Amazon S3 to store your media records, log documents and so forth.
From other of less appropriate S3 has cans to store objects and these pails have all inclusive names. So for instance, you likely will not have the option to open a can named "photographs". Arranging security is somewhat precarious. You must be cautious which cans will be public and which will be private.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It is great for temp infrastructure artifacts during deployment or if you are using containerized apps and Kubernetes. This would be a place to store your files. Whether those are public or private documents, it is a great location to store. Additionally, it is a great place for archives. Storing old data for a really cheap price is something that you can't get on-prem.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I've used S3 continuously for projects large and small for over 10 years. It's just such a common and essential tool in software development. Hosting assets/images, or providing file upload abilities to users, come up very often throughout software, and S3 is hands-down the best place to serve and store files. It's flexible enough that you can use client libraries to perform direct uploads rather than writing your own handlers, etc. S3 is a tool that immediately has value for file hosting and storage, and then extends as far as you need it to for all manner of asset management.
Joshua Dickson | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is particularly well-suited for cases where you have already made the decision to use Amazon's cloud software resources and need to add the option of storing files for use from one or more services. Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is also a good choice for its native integration with Amazon's CDN, Cloudfront. In general, using Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) will make less sense if you are already using other services from another vendor, such as Azure.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Amazon S3 is well suited for hosting any type of object. Highly recommended if already using with any other AWS service since integration becomes easier. It is good for any organization that has a dedicated IT Department. Not recommended if the company does not have a team with experience in AWS services that monitors it since it could end up being a mess or expensive.
April 14, 2021

S3 is a must!

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Backup your environment (from dumps to local files), it is a great alternative. If you think in put your files, and know when they need to be deleted, you may use the bucket policy to automate it for you, If you need that your application receive or send some files, S3 may keep these files too.

Its less appropriate when you need speed to access files. It's not slow, but depending of the speed you need, it's not recommended, yet, cause they're always improving.
James Hilton | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Amazon S3 handles file storage exceptionally well and has the necessary features to be useful to anyone. S3 would not be ideal as a substitute for a computer hard drive but would be as a backup for that hard drive, or an extension of it, which you can delegate access to and where your internet speed is the only factor to consider.
Ramindu Deshapriya | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is well suited for large, unstructured data storage and for querying that data using a range of integrations (e.g., AWS Redshift and AWS Athena). It works very well serving static files associated with applications as well (e.g., file uploads, images, etc.). However, Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) does not serve well as a remote file system or snap-mounted storage for compute engines or VMs.
Mark Nowowiejski | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I use AWS for all my personal work because it's fast and integrates with so many other AWS products that I make use of daily. I love the fact their are various storage classes such as Standard, Infrequently Accessed, One-Zone and Glacier that allow for generous discounts. Glacier Storage within AWS is extremely cheap if you can afford to wait 12 or so hour to 'thaw out' your files. *Also there is an 'Intelligent Tiering' option with AWS will assign the most cost effective storage class for you based on your usage

It's great for storage of files you need to keep for regulatory purposes but will likely never need to access again.

I personally store all my music/photography files on AWS so it's almost impossible to every lose them
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Amazon S3 is well suited for hosting a static website in a very short time and also for storing a huge chunk of data while using AWS services. It was difficult for us to integrate it with Azure cloud services as S3 has tight AWS integration.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is what you are looking for if you require to host static files. That includes serverless websites, images, videos, etc.
  • Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is not suited for web sites that run on a backend (Django, ASP.NET web forms, etc.) because it does not run any server for them to execute.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Amazon S3 is great for any organization that has a dedicated IT or IT Department. You can build out a fully redundant and can scale as your remote backup needs grow. But if not correctly monitored, the storage usage of S3 could become extremely expensive.
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