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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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Learn from top reviewers

Amazon S3

Rating: 9 out of 10
April 29, 2025
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
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 buck...
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Verified user
Consultant
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)6 years of experience

Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) great use for a data lake implementation

Rating: 8 out of 10
April 29, 2025
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
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 hav...
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Verified user
Employee
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)8 years of experience

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

Rating: 9 out of 10
April 27, 2025
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
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...
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Verified user
Manager
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)5 years of experience

Great storage engine for all your AWS needs

Rating: 8 out of 10
June 17, 2024
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
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 ma...
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Nir Levy
Executive - Engineering
VP R&D DevOps and Products
Zoomd Technologies
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)15 years of experience

The best cloud option for object storage!

Rating: 9 out of 10
June 17, 2024
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
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 an...
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Fabricio Zubelli
Engineer - Engineering
DevOps Engineer
Kea
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)2 years of experience
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Pricing

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Amazon S3

Amazon S3

N/A
Unavailable

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.

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee

Offerings

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

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Features

Data Center Backup

Data center backup tools send data to a secure storage location after encryption and de-duplication

8.9
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Enterprise Backup

Enterprise backup solutions are implemented by IT professionals to automatically and safely backup data hosted on a range of systems (including cloud-native workloads, servers, databases, laptops and mobile devices) to external cloud storage.

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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 Retention options and Encryption highest, with a score of 9.7.

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

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Reviews From Top Reviewers

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(1-5 of 77)

Fast, easy-to-use storage for static, media, and uploaded files

Rating: 10 out of 10
Incentivized
March 30, 2017
CC
Corwin Cole
CTO & COO
Apruvd (Financial Services, 1-10 employees)
Vetted Review
Verified User
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
2 years of experience
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
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.
Pros
  • 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.
Cons
  • 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.
Likelihood to Recommend
S3 is excellent for storing and serving static, media, and uploaded files. Keep your JS, CSS, and images there, as well as user-uploaded images and documents and app-generated documents, and then serve them through configuration in your scalable applications. Elastic Beanstalk and Lambda play very well with S3. If you grow to especially large scale, start managing the regions of your S3 buckets for optimal cloud service.

Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) - A Highly Economical, Simple and Easy-to-Use Data Store with Amazing Features

Rating: 10 out of 10
Incentivized
April 29, 2021
Verified User
Professional in Professional Services
Information Technology & Services Company, 201-500 employees
Vetted Review
Reseller
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
4 years of experience
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We are using Amazon S3 for various purposes. We are using it to store backups, to store logs, to store audit trails, to store artefacts, to store website images and to store some other data required by the application. It is being used more like central storage that is economical to serve the purpose of data storage.
Pros
  • Fast as Key-Value Store.
  • Save as many data as you want.
  • Cheap.
  • Easy to use.
  • Versioning.
  • Ability to create events.
Cons
  • Object searching.
  • Filter data by suffix.
  • More fast and economical query method.
Likelihood to Recommend
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.

best storage to use comfortably

Rating: 7 out of 10
Incentivized
April 20, 2021
MA
Mohamed Atnane
Administrative Coordinator
Mediclinic (Hospital & Health Care, 501-1000 employees)
Vetted Review
Verified User
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
1 year of experience
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Our department was looking for storage service that works smoothly and can make our task easily using for storage big amount of data. So we found that Amazon S3 is the suitable one. S3 is monetary and dependable distributed storage which I'm utilizing [regularly]. Presenting some more highlights like referenced in Cons above could make it exceptional and it would be a shared benefit over different items.
Pros
  • More security and safety
  • Flexibility for options
  • simple to use
  • Integration
Cons
  • When the document is erased the record is [not immediately] noticeable since S3 sets aside some effort to refresh. This occasionally makes disarray
  • pricing
  • AWS S3 is not compatible with desktops
Likelihood to Recommend
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.

Simple to use but errors may lead to wrong conclusions

Rating: 8 out of 10
Incentivized
April 15, 2021
Verified User
Administrator in Information Technology
Higher Education Company, 501-1000 employees
Vetted Review
Verified User
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
1 year of experience
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
At this moment it is used at the IT department level, down the road we would like to expand this usage, but we are trying to see how we can safely enable all AWS users with security and compliance in mind. At this moment it allows us to store some temporary data for different infrastructure deployments.
Pros
  • Easy to upload.
  • Easy to access.
  • Simple web interface.
Cons
  • Too many options for regular user.
  • Doesn't check centrally set policies and creates errors that do not represent the problem.
Likelihood to Recommend
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.

You know you're supposed to use S3. Just do it.

Rating: 10 out of 10
Incentivized
January 22, 2018
JS
Justin Schroeder
Partner & Senior Engineer
Braid, LLC (Marketing and Advertising, 11-50 employees)
Vetted Review
Verified User
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
7 years of experience
View profile
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use S3 for everything imaginable, but particularly for storing larger assets like images, video, isos or data files. This allows us to purchase much smaller nodes in terms of attached SSDs. The cost of S3 for storage is almost a non-issue for anything in the sub-terabyte range, especially when compared to the price of larger EC2, Rackspace, or digital ocean instances.
Pros
  • Nearly every web framework now has integrations with the service as an easy plug-and-play storage solution.
  • General integration is so good there are tons of third-party tools like Transmit (for mac) you can mount S3 as a remote disk for easy access, and even Amazon's own web portal for using S3 has gotten quite good.
  • It's incredibly easy to offload all the expensive bandwidth operations for your typical website or app to S3, and, assuming your services are not yet HTTP2, you even get the benefits of sharding.
Cons
  • There is no true hierarchical filesystem in S3. So for example, if you have a file like /images/pizza/1.png, and you delete 1.png it deletes the entire directory structure. Now many tools will place an empty dummy file at /images/pizza to make it appear as if the structure is there – but if you do these operations via api it can be a bit of a gotchya.
  • The bucket namespace is global, so it can be really hard to get a sensible bucket name. Honestly no idea why they made that global.
  • While you can serve S3 content at your own subdomain, you have to have the proper bucket name to do so and this can get pretty cumbersome. Ideally, there would be a better way to mask S3 buckets at a DNS level.
Likelihood to Recommend
Anytime – and I do mean anytime – you have files of any size over, say, 50kb and they are static you should reach for S3 first. In 7 years of using the service, I have never once lost a file. There have been a total of maybe 30 minutes of downtime in 7 years, which was a DNS level issue. The speed is excellent, the availability is incredible, and there simply is no good competitor for the price.
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