Simple Storage Service that does a lot more than just providing simple storage for you
September 27, 2019
Simple Storage Service that does a lot more than just providing simple storage for you

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
We use S3 for reliably and securely storing audios, medical transcriptions, application logs and pretty much everything else. S3 is our go-to cloud storage service as we are already invested in many other core AWS services like EC2, RDS and CloudWatch. We have been using S3 for around 10 years now, and so far, we have never had an issue with it.
Pros
- Reliable and secure way to store objects in cloud: Storing any type of file(text, pdf, doc, csv, etc) is very easy with S3. Fetching this stored content as and when you require is also pretty easy and can be done using both the console and AWS CLI. Appropriate permissions can be set up for buckets using IAM roles/policies.
- Versioning in buckets: S3 gives you a very handy feature to store multiple versions of objects stored in a bucket.
- Lifecycle policies: You can set up lifecycle policies in S3 that can move your older objects to IA or Glacier. This setup is very easy and can be done within minutes for a bucket.
- Replication: The cross-region replication that S3 provides is wonderful. Beware of the inter-regional data transfer costs though.
Cons
- No support for object versions retention: There can be a retention policy(days or number) for object versions that are stored in S3 so that we don't have to worry about paying extra for all the old versions of an object in the bucket.
- No feature for replication within a region: Currently AWS does not support replication within a region. Also, having to enable versioning for buckets in which you need replication makes it even more costly.
- Confusing pricing: The pricing model of S3 can be a little confusing for a new customer with questions regarding data transfer from other AWS services, between buckets or data transfer to the outside world.
- S3 can be a really great service for a company if used properly. We have had troubles related to billing because we had not spent some time understanding the pricing. Understand costs that will be incurred in setting up your system in a way that inter-regional data transfer will happen, or a lot of old versions of objects are stored.
- S3 basically takes away all the maintenance headache of storing your data in cloud. It is durable, scalable and reliable. So, it saves a lot of resources that would be otherwise wasted accomplishing all that. You do not have to worry about servers and the capacity you need to provision for them. S3 takes care of all that for you.
- S3 integrates seamlessly with many other services. My personal favorite is where we use a trigger of S3 upload to invoke a lambda function to process the contents and raise an alarm if there is a validation error. This simple set up will be relatively difficult to implement if you were to use simple servers to store your data.
Do you think Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)'s feature set?
Yes
Did Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) again?
Yes
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