Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)

As storage needs for businesses keep growing by the day building and preserving one’s own storage devices becomes more and more difficult and challenging. This is a tedious job as forecasting your future storage needs may be hard. The end result is you over-use what you have and this causes an application failure or you may even end up buying too many storage stacks which are never used. The Amazon Simple Storage Service or S3 refers to storage service from Amazon as the name suggests but it is distinct from block-and-file storage in cloud. Every object here is stored like a file with the metadata and is also assigned an ID number. So, apps will use this number to access that object. With S3, a customer will be able to download, upload and store any object or file up to 5GB size.

What is the Amazon S3?

Amazon S3 will be available in two storage categories, namely S3 Infrequent Access and S3 Standard. S3 Standard is for application, content distribution, dynamic sites and Big Data while the S3 Infrequent Access is meant for low cost storage for the long-term stored data and backups. The S3 is primarily designed for low-cost storage which is available across many geographical regions. It will offer IT teams and web developers with secure and scalable object storage solutions.

What Are Features Of The Amazon S3 Which Make It Popular?

• The Amazon S3 offers low-cost storage to businesses which makes it cost effective for them

• S3 is also secure as AWS will guarantee data encryption for data stored both through client side encryption and server side encryption techniques.

• S3 is durable and it will routinely verify stored data integrity through the use of checksums. So, if S3 is able to detect data corruption in any form, it will get resolved using replicated data. When data is being stored or retrieved it will also monitor the incoming traffic to detect corrupt data packets.

• Amazon S3 is highly scalable because it can easily scale up your storage depending on your requirements. You only have to pay for storage you use.

• It is possible to store any kind of data in the Amazon S3 and in any format. So, the volume, number or capacities of objects which may be stored in S3 are unlimited.

How Will Data Be Organized In Amazon S3?

In the Amazon S3, data is put in buckets where the bucket is considered to be a logical storage unit. It will contain objects which have data and metadata. Prior to adding any data inside the S3, users must create the bucket for storing objects. You are free to choose the region in which you wish your data to be stored. This decision is an important one and therefore needs planning. You must consider factors like pricing, latency, service availability, and customer locations. To get the best user experience, it is necessary to select a region which suits your needs the best. You can also benefit from cross-region replication by which you get to transfer or replicate data to another location without any difficulty. Apart from the traditional way of transferring data over the Internet, the AWS has other ways for secure data transfer at a much speedier rate.