Does its job for the intended use case.
March 27, 2017
Does its job for the intended use case.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
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.
- Positive ROI - It's cheaper to store on S3 than any other cloud mechanism that's offered to us. S3's revenue model where they charge for what you use is also very lucrative because now you are not worried about buying the bulk of storage that you don't use.
- Another positive is it ties in with the Amazon ecosystem. So if you have rest of your services in AWS, then it makes complete sense to use S3 so that the network latency is greatly reduced.
- I haven't had a negative yet, so nothing to comment on that.
- Dropbox and Google Drive
I haven't been personally involved in the decision to use S3, but in comparison to Dropbox or Google Drive, this offers a less robust UI to modify things, while being a cheaper storage mechanism over the rest.