Item: Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
Rating: 8
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

At my organization, we primarily use Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) as a catch all storage solution. In particular, we have built our entire data lake around it, so we have “raw layer” buckets, “clean layer” buckets and so on. There are of course other uses, such as simple “data dump” buckets but in general we aim to use Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) as our main storage solution.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Bucket name uniqueness, as it forces to implement some rudimentary form of naming organization
Flexibility in the buckets management: policies, version control, etc
Available APIs: it is possible to interact with Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) quite easily thanks to the various APIs to read/write/update the objects

Cons

UI: it could be a bit more intuitive, especially when there are deleted elements
Filter on the prefix (partial) name: in a lot of cases, the precise full path and name of the object must be know to find it
It’s very easy to have too broad policies or completely lock yourself out from a bucket, it would be nice to have some guardrails in place

Return on Investment

Affordable: the entire data lake and most of our raw data is on Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) and it’s not the most expensive feature from AWS we use
Easy to onboard to: we are aiming for 100% of data being synced to Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) in some form, so that data is located in a single place
Good integration with other systems, reduced overall costs for us and time to reach a decision

Usability

The UI could have some improvements (better filters) and there is a lack of some useful functionality, such as renaming an existing bucket: the latter is much needed in the context of rapidly evolving companies. Overall though, Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is easy to use and to onboard people and tools to, thanks to its various APIs and flexibility.

Key Insights

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?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Apache Airflow, Apache Spark, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)

Likelihood to Recommend

I believe that Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is perfect for a Data Lake implementation: this is because you can either have buckets per layer or you can organize layers in the prefix of a single bucket; either way, you have flexibility to organize your data as you prefer. I would not recommend it if your data strategy and naming convention changes often, as it’s not easily possible to move data from one bucket to another (and you cannot rename the existing one, which is probably one of the features I miss the most)

Amazon S3 Feature Ratings

Comments

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Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) great use for a data lake implementation