A true view on S3
We are using S3 as a images and files storage, Earlier we were using our own static ip based server but we faced to many server downs and …
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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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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 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 Systems | Unspecified |
|---|---|
| Mobile Application | No |
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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August 16, 2017
S3 for backups and web media storage
S3 is used by us for offsite backup storage and also hosts some media files for a web application. S3 is very cheap storage and solves the issue of storage, it has a great API which has made automating offsite backups easy, it also has granular access control over files which has assisted in providing a backup service for my customers.
- The storage is fast
- There are flexible storage options for even cheaper long term storage
- "Client" access accounts can be created that look nice to give clients access to their own storage which is stored on my account.
- The Amazon CLI API makes automating reliable backups possible on Windows Servers. Other consumer based services such as dropbox won't run as a "service" and need the user logged in so isn't appropriate for a database server.
- Amazon has it's own JSON format for granular account control and is difficult to implement. There have been improvements to moving that towards a GUI based control system but not all of the features are there yet.
June 19, 2017
S3 at a glance. PROS and CONS.
We use amazon S3 to store all of our data collected from many mobile applications. All of Big Data related workloads consumes run on the data stored in S3.It's cheaper and reliable to store petabyte scale data.
- AWS S3 is a secure service with variety of encryption services available, it is a best bet. We encrypt most of our data using AWS KMS (Client-Side) encryption where we manage the key and the data is secure on the servers.
- We started using S3 to overcome the cost of maintaining the data nodes on Hadoop EMR just for the sole purpose of storing data as it was way expensive than storing the data on S3.
- Due to its nature to scale infinitely and also availability we had to choose this platform to make sure our app's have maximum availability.
- Not to mention the durability and the easy to manage nature of S3.
- Should reduce the cost of IO when transferring the data to glacier archives. Its expensive I believe. When the transfer is between AWS resources the cost should be minimal or negligible.
- Scanning for the object size (Get Size) using the new aws S3 console is considerably slower. AWS team should maintain a hourly or daily metadata backup of the bucket or object structure which would fetch the results faster.
- I would love to see a minimal outages in the future as it has impacted many businesses recently because of the long lasting outage.
April 19, 2017
The best image and file storage program
I use Amazon S3 to host email images and other web images used on multiple websites. It is used widely by the marketing, tech, and even the customer service department. It created a great alternative for where we store files.
- Simple File Hosting
- Inexpensive
- Fast
- Better front end UI
- Less downtime
- Better status updates
We are using Amazon S3 as an online repository for online backups. This addresses the needs of having data stored offsite with multiple layers of redundancy.
- Security - S3 is great at encrypting traffic at rest and in transit.
- Integration - S3 works great with multiple applications which is great for us since we don't have to be married to a partciluar software solution for online backups.
- Billing - Easy to read and straight forward for clients.
- Ease of use - Pretty difficult to setup if you aren't in the industry. Not something a notice user can setup without spending some time with it.
April 03, 2017
S3 is trusted and reliable for cloud native applications
We use S3 for all distributed file storage for all of our web applications. We run entirely on the cloud, in AWS, and S3 is the only way we offload data, so that it isn't stored on EC2 machines. This allows us to be able to persist data, and recover data in the event a server terminates (very likely in a cloud only environment). In addition to application data, all of our customer data is serialized and stored in S3 in addition to our databases for further post ad-hoc analysis. S3 allows us to have a virtual SAN without any complications.
- S3 is available in various regions around the world.
- You can host a website on S3 and use AWS optimized routing for very fast page loads.
- S3 is versioned, so you can restore a backup.
- S3 web console is great, but could be more user-friendly.
- S3 versioning should be enabled by default, and users prompted to disable.
- S3 desktop client would help end users access data.
Amazon S3 is one of the primary Amazon Web Services that we use to power our website, including the web application that employees use for our core business functions. We utilize S3 to automatically store all claim documentation and legal agreements uploaded or generated through our web app. S3 is also automatically used by Amazon's Elastic Beanstalk to store zipped packages of previous versions of our application, in case we require a rollback. Finally, S3 is where we store all of our static and media files, e.g. JavaScript, CSS, and images. Our EB application serves these files from S3 rather than from its local machine.
- Automatically stores previous versions of applications deployed to Elastic Beanstalk, to preserve rollbacks.
- Integrates with Python applications using the boto library.
- Serves static and media files quickly and reliably.
- The documentation about caching, CORS protection, and permissions in general could be easier to comprehend. For experts on cloud architecture, I'm sure it's fine, but as a novice, it was very difficult to wrap my head around.
- Could come with some Amazon-vetted JavaScript, especially a framework like jQuery, Angular, etc. Having to upload my own copies of frameworks like jQuery into S3 so that I'm not dependent on an external CDN is a little redundant.
- I'm not sure if it already comes with virus protection or if that would even make sense, but if not, that could be a feature. Really I have almost no complaints.
March 30, 2017
Amazon S3 - The Best in Storage
It is our central data store for resources. Aside from one outage, it has been incredibly beneficial to use. Its persistent storage is always available and delivers our assets quickly. I'm am such a big fan that I have adopted it for all my personal projects as well. Amazon Simple Storage Service is used across all departments both engineering and non-engineering.
- Storage of assets
- Uploading of images and other content from users
- Backing builds and other essential components to engineering
- There is some difficulty learning Amazon S3 which is common for all their products. There is a lot happening which takes time to dig in and get how they all fit together.
- They had a big outage this year which brought down many large companies' website. This is a huge deal for something that so many people rely on.
- It would be nice if it were more friendly for non-engineers.
March 29, 2017
Why I am so impressed with Amazon Web Services!
We are using Amazon S3 for multiple clients and our own purposes.
S3 is a simple to use Cloud based storage product that is a secure, scale-able low cost approach for any organization that needs to have off site storage for the purposes of backup or retention, document storage and archiving. Good versioning control, secure access and an almost infinite ability to increase your storage effortlessly as your organization's needs grow. Amazon has a very easy to use interface and for users that are not very technically minded there are third party tools out there like Filezilla and S3 Fox that enable the upload and download of files in easy to use folders that anyone can feel comfortable with. Amazon S3 is also a very robust and safe storage of your files and documents as it has 99.999999999 %. Availability and your data is spread over multiple zones so that there is an as close to zero chance of data loss as is possible. I would thoroughly and unequivocally recommend Amazon S3 storage to businesses in any environment.
- Easy creation of Buckets that mimic what most people are familiar with like a folder on your desktop computer.
- Easy to use interface to upload, download or delete files.
- Secure and easy to control who has access to your information.
- Scale-able without committing to a fixed price over time.
- I think file dates on upload should reflect the date that the file was created on the original source, not the date that you uploaded it, or at least have that option.
- Drag and drop from your desktop would be a useful ability.
- Would be nice to be able to import directly from other clouds, like One Drive, Google Drive or Dropbox.
March 27, 2017
Does its job for the intended use case.
We use S3 for storage of deployment release backups, database backups, storing internal tech talk videos, as internal CDN (Content Delivery Network), and storing large documents internally. The primary business problem is [that it's] a cheap storage mechanism with unlimited storage that would be billed based on what we use. Cheap and scalability are the two primary business needs that S3 offers over other systems.
- Its a scalable solution with unlimited storage that bills for what you use. This would replace our mindset from 'would we run out of memory' to 'does it need to be stored'
- Simple API with built in permissions using IAM would allow us to programmatically manage documents.
- S3 has robust compression algorithms that do a pretty good job of compressing and decompressing things. We saw cases where the zip files were compressed up to 40% upon uploads.
- Reliability and Multi zone backups would mean that even if one zone is shut down like it happened few weeks ago, your data is still safe.
- Better user interface, for all the functionality that S3 offers, the UI for AWS suite of applications is still clunky to say the least. The UI offers manual selection of files or drag and drop file uploads. But from my experience the drag and drop functionality does not work well for large files. It takes forever to manually upload the files from the UI and there is certainly a room for improvement.
- Wish the security is distilled down from a separate IAM module and integrated into S3. Say for example, if I want to restrict a specific set of users, why should I go to the IAM to restrict it? Why not have that functionality from that specific bucket itself, so that I dont lose my context.
March 24, 2017
Amazon S3 for Backups
We use Amazon S3 to store our Office365 Backups from AvePointe, We have a S3 Bucket Provisioned and replicated to a different region. We also use the S3 infrastructure in conjunction with the Amazon Storage Gateway Product which Stores our Microsoft Exchange On-Prem Legal Hold backups. This is what we are using for our storage platform for the entire enterprise for Backups. This has simplified our solution for LongTerm Off-Premise Backups.
- Geo-Replication. Even in the event of a AWS Downtime/Issue our data remained available across different Geo-Zones. You have to configure and pay for this, however, if you dont set it up you may lose access to your data.
- An S3 Bucket presented with the Storage Gateway is a great way to mount your storage volumes. This operates through a linux based appliance which connects over the cloud to your volumes and presents itself as an ISCSI Connector. You can connect to many Volumes using this appliance.
- The Cloud Monitoring is also a great tool to keep an eye on your volumes health and performance.
- Overall they do a great job in making the product as easy as possible. One feature we would like to see for our Radiology Storage is File Server Paths to use. Our Legacy Image Distribution requires full UNC Paths to the storage Shares.
We use amazon s3 to persist all of our internal and client data in the cloud. It is a fantastic choice when your infrastructure is also hosted within the AWS ecosystem, as all of their technologies interoperate very nicely with the S3 storage service. It sort of eliminates the need for traditional dev ops.
- Storing any types of data
- Interacting with other services and technologies in the AWS ecosystem
- Horizontal scalability of data storage
- Better interoperability with tools outside of the AWS toolkit
- The command line client is very verbose and clunky to use
- Better client tools for interacting with S3
March 22, 2017
Free to be S3: Cost-Effective Site Hosting
I use Amazon S3 to host websites for myself and clients I build them for. I've used other web hosting services but have found S3 to offer the best combination of ease of use, cost controls, and reliability. S3 buckets have been a lifesaver for me in allowing me to manage multiple sites in the easiest manner available while keeping my site hosting expenses to a minimum.
- Cost reduction is a major factor in my selection of Amazon S3 for hosting websites. When you host your site on S3 you are billed for the traffic you use, not based on a flat-rate. As a result it is far easier to keep site hosting expenses low, and scale up when you need to.
- S3 buckets are managed through a very simple and easy interface that is extremely well-documented and can be set up with a few clicks. I can deploy a site in under five minutes, so the time-saving aspects of this are hard to overstate.
- AWS is known for reliability and you can be confident that your site or data hosted on an S3 bucket will be available when you or your clients need it. As anyone knows, site reliability is a major factor in driving business decisions on whom to select as a host, and you can't get much better than AWS.
- Learning curve can be a bit steep for some of the more advanced features for the service.
- Could be a bit more accessible for non-technical or lower-technical users such as small business owners and non-tech professionals.
- Bucket policies can be daunting to work with (although some example baseline policies are available).
March 21, 2017
"Strong object-store database to help you store data at your desired scale with high security options"
Wow, S3 is an Amazon object store product. However big the file size, whatever format the file is, we don't need to worry, just store the data and retrieve it whenever needed. Similar to other AWS Services, using AWS SDK, you can access S3 at a much faster and easier way, and don't really need to worry about writing REST API. I feel it handles our major business issue of storing data in one format and converting it to another, which is expensive and also time consuming, S3 is a wonderful solution for all these problems.
- We use S3 as an easy file sharing platform for official handovers within the company.
- Using the bucket policies, you can easily restrict the users accessing the files. Also, have server side encryption, so don't need to worry encrypting and decrypting back the data.
- The scale of S3 is really fascinating - It's huuuuge and highly scalable.
- I feel managing the data in the object store, using the AWS Console is quite complicated/difficult, but they have improved the S3 UI recently which is pretty fascinating.
- Uploading folders was quite complicated previously, haven't checked the new console though.
March 14, 2017
The Name Says it all! Simple, simple simple.
S3 is an immensely valuable storage solution.
We use it for:
We use it for:
- Managing Remote State for Terraform Infrastructure-as-code
- storing and restoring-from backups
- managing lifecycles of backups
- Providing state and storage for lambda functions
- Image repositories
- new uploads to S3 bucket automatically trigger lambda functions to resize
- S3 - as its name implies is dead simple. You don't spend your time thinking about storage, you spend your time building the app that consumes it
- Lifecycle management is critical for backups. You can set bucket lifecycle rules which move files to glacier and then remove them after set times.
- Accessibility from local development makes for great dev workflows
- My team hasn't run into any pain points so far...it's been very easy to use. "lacking features" actually keep things simple and keep it from being a God-service
February 27, 2017
S3 is a great, reliable place to keep your data if you are already using AWS, but don't fall down the rabbit hole of services.
We utilize Amazon web services as one of several preferred cloud providers, which we use to host WordPress sites after we have completed the design, giving the client a private, managed server cluster within the same price range of a basic WordPress host. We specifically use S3 as the primary storage location of all site content, and as a cache/cdn service. This lets us use the EC2 storage for storing only server related files, which reduces storage costs and potential data loss, as we can quickly rebuild our servers, while not having to worry about the safety and integrity of the sites content. We essentially use S3 in the same way one would use a NAS or SAN on a web hosting network, which is a fairly accurate comparison due to the integration and partnership that Amazon has with EMC, giving S3 similar functionality as a physical EMC SAN.
- One of the main attractions of S3 is the quality of it's basic services, including security, stored data integrity, and data availability from almost anywhere via almost any system. The snapshot service is one of the best services offered through a cloud, and has always been a required feature for any SAN device I potentially purchase.
- S3 has a strong partnership with EMC, which has allowed S3 to offer a wide variety of services and features that would normally require the customer to purchase an EC device, which opens up high-level storage to smaller companies at an affordable rate.
- S3 has a major lead over other cloud providers due to the S3 service, and the wide range of capabilities. Instead of being a simple "drive" it can natively operate as a web server, hosting a wide array of static content, which reduces server load and costs. This is a major advantage, especially for someone operating within the free tier, where every little bit of processing power is an important resource.
- The final selling point of S3 for myself, was the ability to connect into a wide variety of services, both local Amazon services, such as CloudFront CDN, and remote non-Amazon services such as WordPress backup solutions, which ends up keeping all of my data across the organization at one easy to access, and secure location.
- While S3 has a huge list of available services, the services themselves tend to be lacking, such as the web server capability being able to only host static HTML content.
- The additional capabilities have gotten a bit "out of hand" in terms of the amount of services available, which seemingly follow no particular grouping, which can make venturing beyond basic S3 storage services a daunting, and confusing endeavor.
- Not having any storage "packages" for serving data is a big negative, as we would feel more comfortable with a set package, and a known monthly cost, rather than a fluctuating service billed by time x data.
July 22, 2016
S3 is only place to keep files
it is used for backups of all our files. We use S3 and glacier and encryption.
- high availability
- cheap
- encryption at rest
- s3cmd makes it easy to sync
- I would love to be able to use s3 easily for ftp type work
- I would like to see s3 console searchable
- I would like to see a better way to manage access. The IAM/bucket policy process is confusing
July 18, 2016
Simple, Reliable, Maintainable Storage - Amazon S3
My current company is still in the process of moving to the AWS stack, but my previous company already had a successful story using Amazon tools, including S3. It was used across the whole organization. Server logs and data from the MySQL database were replicated to S3, and from there, the data got processed by Mapreduce programs running on EMR, and eventually get stored in RedShift or Elasticsearch. S3 is also used as a fast and neat backup storage for RedShift and Elasticsearch.
- Easy-to-use command line interface and APIs.
- Great integration with other Amazon services.
- Secured. And access can be easily managed with IAM service.
- GUI is not user-friendly. I had to use a third party tool called S3Hub to do quick file downloads/uploads for testing.
July 15, 2016
Amazon S3 Review
Amazon S3 is used as an archiving solution and for object storage. Additionally, our corporate storage solution also allows us to automatically tier any longer term archive requirements to an Amazon public cloud should our clients have that requirement. This provides a unique and robust solution that can meet our customers' needs.
- Dev ops, storage and archiving - The capability of Amazon S3 to fulfill these requirements is pretty cool in my opinion.
- The always-on and always available cloud storage solution is bar none.
- Security - The first time that I had used Amazon S3 and EC2 was an eye opening experience. The security considerations that Amazon took into account in developing their cloud solution is amazing. There's IAM management, key management etc. Take a drive of Amazon's solution and you'll realize the security considerations they've taken to protect and secure your data.
- Applications - There is pretty much 100s of applications on Amazon that are supported with S3.
- I think Amazon is already doing a lot of good things and making improvements. I'm pretty sure there's a few skunk works already in progress to tackle functionality. :)