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S3 is trusted and reliable for cloud native applications
April 03, 2017

S3 is trusted and reliable for cloud native applications

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)

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.
  • Complex business storage requirements for our customers and applications have been addressed by S3.
  • We are able to store vast amounts of sensor and video data, at a very low cost.
  • We are able to provide fast access to data across the world, with the various regions S3 supports.
  • Azure Storage
We chose S3 over Azure Storage because it integrated very easily and quickly with our existing AWS environment. S3 pricing was also cheaper than Azure at the time. S3 is also more mature and has been on the market 10 years longer than Azure Storage. Amazon also offers a higher SLA with S3 than Microsoft.
S3 is very cheap and is easy to set up if you are already on AWS. It integrates with virtually every AWS service and has very good documentation in terms of setting it up, implementing distributed web applications, and operationally keeping your costs low. If you have data that has complex business logic and workflows, S3 is able to support various requirements with lifecycle policies. S3 also has different storage tiers that are priced at different rates to enable business continuity and allow mission critical applications the SLA's they demand while pushing non-mission critical applications to lower tiers.

S3 may not be suitable if you are on another cloud platform like GCE or Azure. In that case, it might be better to use their distributed file system. However, S3 has an open API and is able to work in a hybrid-cloud environment if need be.