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S3, the entry drug to AWS
September 05, 2019

S3, the entry drug to AWS

Jonathan Kempf, UXC | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)

We use S3 as our primary storage solution. It is also being used as an intermediary between levels of micro-services. The primary storage in S3 is for heavy access, but we also put a CDN in front of it.
  • Cold Storage
  • Basic Storage
  • Integration into AWS
  • Usage as an NFS
  • Speed
  • Updated API
  • I was able to move over image storage from our Rails app to S3, resulting in better usage of resources.
  • S3 enabled me to use a new system for image resizing in AWS Lambda
Whether you want to use AWS or not is generally the reason why you would want to use S3. Its feature set and price point are comparable to others (B2/ Drive), but you get the access to AWS. If I had all the time in the world, I would go the B2 route, but the integrations are not as good.
The first level support generally doesn't know anything. I only was able to learn a lot about S3 by talking to an actual Amazon Engineer.
If you are planning on using S3 as a basic storage solution, I would recommend it. It compares well both on price and feature set to other comparable static file stores such as Google Drive and Backblaze B2. However, with S3, you get the benefit of being integrated into the AWS ecosystem. You can set up fairly complex data layers and services with ease by having your data in S3, as compared to other services.

However, if you are thinking of using S3 as a kind of NFS replacement, I wouldn't recommend it. There is no idea of object pointers in S3, so folders don't exist. Therefore, complex "nested" file organizations are really just a series of strings prefixed to the actual file. This results in slow speeds unless you setup filename hashing.

Using Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)

The AWS S3 API is translated into every language you can think of, and is very powerful. However, the split of features into the AWS CLI -> S3 and AWS CLI -> S3API causes some confusion when dealing with complex uploading and metadata.