Amazon S3 - Storage as far as the eye can see; and then further
May 11, 2021

Amazon S3 - Storage as far as the eye can see; and then further

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

Overall Satisfaction with Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)

Amazon S3 is the backbone of our data storage. We store 90% plus of all data in S3. It also serves as a backup and disaster recovery plan as we take other storage solutions and back them up to S3. It is also used for data flow and transfer from/to internal/external vendors.
  • Storing mass amount of data.
  • Cheap storage options.
  • Versioning of objects.
  • Different cost tiers for what you need.
  • Notifications on Object changes.
  • The UI is clunky and not great.
  • It can get costly fast depending on how you use it.
  • There are underlying/unknown issues that make you have to consider how to store you data to achieve maximum rewards.
  • Vast amounts of data storage has let us grow without limitation.
  • We do need to babysit the costs since it is one of our most expensive products due to sheer scale.
  • S3 has let us move off of really expensive Databases which was a huge win.
It depends on your tier within Amazon on how great of support you get. For us we have a dedicated Point of Contact that is great in taking in what we need and discussing it with the S3 team. The best thing is features we need or suggest have a good chance of landing on their roadmap.

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

The UI is clunky. The CLI is a little esoteric and hard to grapple with. The API documentation is pretty good, but I would recommend wrapping a very thin wrapper class/package around it if you expect to use it a lot. There is a lot of overhead you can cut off by implementing your own code.
  • We use S3 as an entry point (landing zone for data). We can then transform (normalize) the data and store it again.
  • S3 has great services built around automating tasks to be done when an object is updated/created/deleted.
  • S3 has built-in replication for back up and disaster recovery.
It is not great that some of it features require you to think about how you want to store your data. For example to get the cheapest usage it is recommended to use less objects with greater size instead of many objects of tiny size.