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Storage, yes, but simple. Not for everyone.
Updated July 01, 2021

Storage, yes, but simple. Not for everyone.

Matthew Gardner | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)

We use Amazon's Simple Storage Service to store both static and somewhat dynamic assets. It is used in conjunction with Amazon's CloudFront service. It is a simple, cost-effective way to serve assets across our web apps, mobile apps, and websites. It solves the problem of reliable distribution at an affordable price, all wrapped up in a scalable solution. Between our various properties, we distribute over 1TB of data per month across millions of instances.
  • Scalable
  • Reliable
  • Well documented
  • Hard to use
  • Not for non-developers
  • Bad online UI
  • Simple hosting
  • Fast to get up and running
  • Easy integration
  • Reliable/no downtime
S3 is still being used within our org but we have dialed it back heavily due to the inexpensive competing product CloudFlare offers. CloudFlare is basically free for the same functionality and the company has matured to the point where it is reliable and scalable, plus CDN distribution is their bread and butter on top of that. If we were starting over today I'd start with CloudFlare.
S3 is a VERY quick way to get up and running. Very simple for developers to use and have work. With the rest of Amazon's offerings, it can scale to be distributed via CDN, replicated, etc. If you need non-developers to store/update, though, this may not be the solution for you. The UI is far too confusing and easy to make a mistake on, and if you use CloudFront you need to invalidate, etc. with new uploads which is hard to grasp as a non-developer. As well, other companies have far less expensive solutions which scale just as well.