AWS S3
AWS Tutorial: Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)
Welcome to the Amazon S3 lesson. EBS is great for operating systems, but if you need to store billions of user photos or endless server logs, you need an infinitely scalable object store.
Why Learn Amazon S3?
Amazon S3 is arguably the most popular service in AWS. It is used by Netflix to stream movies, by banks for data backups, and by websites to host images. Knowing how to use S3 buckets is a core requirement for almost any cloud role.
Tutorial Overview
In this tutorial, you will learn:
- What Object Storage is.
- The concept of S3 Buckets and Objects.
- The benefits of S3's eleven 9s of durability.
What is Amazon S3?
Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) provides object storage built to retrieve any amount of data from anywhere on the internet. Unlike EBS, which is locked to a single EC2 instance, S3 is a standalone web service accessed via APIs.
Buckets and Objects
- Buckets: A bucket is the fundamental container in S3. It acts like a top-level folder. Bucket names must be globally unique across all AWS accounts in the world!
- Objects: A file and any metadata that describes that file. Examples include a
.jpgphoto, a.csvdata dump, or an.mp4video. S3 can store objects up to 5 Terabytes in size each!
99.999999999% Durability
When you upload a photo to an S3 Bucket, AWS automatically duplicates that photo across multiple independent facilities within the AWS Region. This provides 11 9s of durability (99.999999999%), meaning if you store 10 million objects, you can expect to lose a single file once every 10,000 years!
Exercise
?What is the fundamental container in Amazon S3 that must have a globally unique name?