What is Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)?

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance.

Customers of all sizes and industries can use Amazon S3 to store and protect any amount of data for a range of use cases, such as data lakes, websites, mobile applications, backup and restore, archive, enterprise applications, IoT devices, and big data analytics.

Amazon S3 provides management features so that you can optimize, organize, and configure access to your data to meet your specific business, organizational, and compliance requirements.

How Amazon S3 works

Amazon S3 is an object storage service that stores data as objects, hierarchical data, or tabular data within buckets. An object is a file and any metadata that describes the file. A bucket is a container for objects.

To store your data in Amazon S3, you first create a bucket and specify a bucket name and AWS Region. Then, you upload your data to that bucket as objects in Amazon S3. Each object has a key (or key name), which is the unique identifier for the object within the bucket.

S3 provides features that you can configure to support your specific use case. For example, you can use S3 Versioning to keep multiple versions of an object in the same bucket, which allows you to restore objects that are accidentally deleted or overwritten.

Buckets and the objects in them are private and can be accessed only if you explicitly grant access permissions. You can use bucket policies, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies, access control lists (ACLs), and S3 Access Points to manage access.

Buckets:

Amazon S3 supports three types of buckets—general purpose buckets, directory buckets, and table buckets. Each type of bucket provides a unique set of features for different use cases.

General purpose buckets – General purpose buckets are recommended for most use cases and access patterns and are the original S3 bucket type. A general purpose bucket is a container for objects stored in Amazon S3, and you can store any number of objects in a bucket and across all storage classes (except for S3 Express One Zone), so you can redundantly store objects across multiple Availability Zones.

Directory buckets – Recommended for low-latency use cases and data-residency use cases. By default, you can create up to 100 directory buckets in your AWS account, with no limit on the number of objects that you can store in a directory bucket.

Table buckets – Recommended for storing tabular data, such as daily purchase transactions, streaming sensor data, or ad impressions. Tabular data represents data in columns and rows, like in a database table. Table buckets provide S3 storage that's optimized for analytics and machine learning workloads, with features designed to continuously improve query performance and reduce storage costs for tables.