S3, the entry drug to AWS

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.

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.