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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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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

(331)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(51-68 of 68)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Carl Schwarz | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
ResellerIncentivized
  • 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.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Corwin Cole | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Mark Richards | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
ResellerIncentivized
  • 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.
Anudeep P | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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

Michael Jipping | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Ivan Miller | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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
Joel Tanzi | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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).
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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
Craig Nash | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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
Yanan Wang | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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

Dominic Cheah | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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. :)
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