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Amazon S3 Functionality

Amazon S3 is intentionally built with a minimal feature set.

• Write, read, and delete objects containing from 1 byte to 5 gigabytes of data each. The number of objects you can store is unlimited.
• Each object is stored in a bucket and retrieved via a unique, developer-assigned key.
• A bucket can be stored in one of several Regions. You can choose a Region to optimize for latency, minimize costs, or address regulatory requirements. Amazon S3 is currently available in the US Standard, EU (Ireland), US West (Northern California) and Asia Pacific (Singapore) Regions. The US Standard Region automatically routes requests to facilities in Northern Virginia or the Pacific Northwest using network maps.
• Objects stored in a Region never leave the Region unless you transfer them out. For example, objects stored in the EU (Ireland) Region never leave the EU.
• Authentication mechanisms are provided to ensure that data is kept secure from unauthorized access. Objects can be made private or public, and rights can be granted to specific users.
• Uses standards-based REST and SOAP interfaces designed to work with any Internet-development toolkit.
• Built to be flexible so that protocol or functional layers can easily be added. The default download protocol is HTTP. A BitTorrent™ protocol interface is provided to lower costs for high-scale distribution.
• Reliability backed with the Amazon S3 Service Level Agreement.

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Protecting Your Data

Amazon S3 provides a highly durable storage infrastructure designed for mission-critical and primary data storage. Objects are redundantly stored on multiple devices across multiple facilities in an Amazon S3 Region. To help ensure durability, Amazon S3 PUT and COPY operations synchronously store your data across multiple facilities before returning SUCCESS. Once stored, Amazon S3 maintains the durability of your objects by quickly detecting and repairing any lost redundancy. Amazon S3 also regularly verifies the integrity of data stored using checksums. If corruption is detected, it is repaired using redundant data. In addition, Amazon S3 calculates checksums on all network traffic to detect corruption of data packets when storing or retrieving data.

Amazon S3’s standard storage is:

• Backed with the Amazon S3 Service Level Agreement.
• Designed to provide 99.999999999% durability and 99.99% availability of objects over a given year.
• Designed to sustain the concurrent loss of data in two facilities.

Amazon S3 provides further protection via Versioning. You can use Versioning to preserve, retrieve, and restore every version of every object stored in your Amazon S3 bucket. This allows you to easily recover from both unintended user actions and application failures. By default, requests will retrieve the most recently written version. Older versions of an object can be retrieved by specifying a version in the request. Storage rates apply for every version stored.

Reduced Redundancy Storage (RRS) is a new storage option within Amazon S3 that enables customers to reduce their costs by storing non-critical, reproducible data at lower levels of redundancy than Amazon S3’s standard storage. It provides a cost-effective, highly available solution for distributing or sharing content that is durably stored elsewhere, or for storing thumbnails, transcoded media, or other processed data that can be easily reproduced. The RRS option stores objects on multiple devices across multiple facilities, providing 400 times the durability of a typical disk drive, but does not replicate objects as many times as standard Amazon S3 storage, and thus is even more cost effective. Reduced Redundancy Storage is:

• Backed with the Amazon S3 Service Level Agreement.
• Designed to provide 99.99% durability and 99.99% availability of objects over a given year. This durability level corresponds to an average annual expected loss of 0.01% of objects.
• Designed to sustain the loss of data in a single facility.

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Pricing

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Getting Started with Amazon S3

Using Amazon S3 is easy. To get started you:

• Create a Bucket to store your data. You can choose a Region where your bucket and object(s) reside to optimize latency, minimize costs, or address regulatory requirements.
• Upload Objects to your Bucket. Your data is durably stored and backed by the Amazon S3 Service Level Agreement.
• Optionally, set access controls. You can grants others access your data from anywhere in the world.

You can easily and securely create buckets, upload objects, and set access controls using the AWS Management Console. The console provides a point-and-click web-based interface for accessing and managing all of your Amazon S3 resources. The Amazon S3 Getting Started Guide shows you how to start using Amazon S3 from the console. Developers building applications can use the AWS SDK for .NET, the AWS SDK for Java, or a wide variety of 3rd party libraries for other platforms and languages.

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Transferring Large Amounts of Data

AWS Import/Export accelerates moving large amounts of data into and out of AWS using portable storage devices for transport. AWS transfers your data directly onto and off of storage devices using Amazon’s high-speed internal network and bypassing the Internet. For significant data sets, AWS Import/Export is often faster than Internet transfer and more cost effective than upgrading your connectivity. You can use AWS Import/Export for migrating data into the cloud, distributing content to your customers, sending backups to AWS, and disaster recovery.

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Common Use Cases

Amazon S3 can be used to support a wide variety of use cases, for example:

Amazon S3 provides a highly durable and available store for a variety of content, ranging from web applications to media files. It allows you to offload your entire storage infrastructure onto the cloud, where you can take advantage of Amazon S3’s scalability and pay-as-you-go pricing to handle your growing storage needs. You can distribute your content directly from Amazon S3 or use Amazon S3 as an origin store for pushing content to your Amazon CloudFront edge locations.

For sharing content that is either easily reproduced or where you’re storing an original copy elsewhere, Amazon S3’s Reduced Redundancy Storage (RRS) feature provides a compelling solution. For example, if you’re storing media content in-house but you need to provide accessibility to your customers, channel partners, or employees, RRS is a low-cost solution for storing and sharing this content. Whether you’re storing pharmaceutical data for analysis, financial data for computation and pricing, or photo images for resizing, Amazon S3 is an ideal location to store your original content. You can then send this content to Amazon EC2 for computation, resizing, or other large scale analytics – without incurring any data transfer charges for moving the data between the services. You can then choose to store the resulting, reproducible content using Amazon S3’s Reduced Redundancy Storage feature (or, of course, you can store it using Amazon S3’s standard storage as well). The Amazon S3 solution offers a highly durable, scalable, and secure solution for backing up and archiving your critical data. You can use Amazon S3’s Versioning capability to provide even further protection for your stored data. If you have data sets of significant size, you can use AWS Import/Export to move large amounts of data into and out of AWS with physical storage devices. This is ideal for moving large quantities of data for periodic backups, or quickly retrieving data for disaster recovery scenarios.

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Resources

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Amazon S3 Design Requirements

Amazon S3 is based on the idea that quality Internet-based storage should be taken for granted. It helps free developers from worrying about how they will store their data, whether it will be safe and secure, or whether they will have enough storage available. It frees them from the upfront costs of setting up their own storage solution as well as the ongoing costs of maintaining and scaling their storage servers. The functionality of Amazon S3 is simple and robust: Store any amount of data inexpensively and securely, while ensuring that the data will always be available when you need it. Amazon S3 enables developers to focus on innovating with data, rather than figuring out how to store it.

Amazon S3 was built to fulfill the following design requirements:

• Scalable: Amazon S3 can scale in terms of storage, request rate, and users to support an unlimited number of web-scale applications. It uses scale as an advantage: Adding nodes to the system increases, not decreases, its availability, speed, throughput, capacity, and robustness.

• Reliable: Store data with up to 99.999999999% durability, with 99.99% availability. There can be no single points of failure. All failures must be tolerated or repaired by the system without any downtime.

• Fast: Amazon S3 must be fast enough to support high-performance applications. Server-side latency must be insignificant relative to Internet latency. Any performance bottlenecks can be fixed by simply adding nodes to the system.

• Inexpensive: Amazon S3 is built from inexpensive commodity hardware components. All hardware will eventually fail and this must not affect the overall system. It must be hardware-agnostic, so that savings can be captured as Amazon continues to drive down infrastructure costs.

• Simple: Building highly scalable, reliable, fast, and inexpensive storage is difficult. Doing so in a way that makes it easy to use for any application anywhere is more difficult. Amazon S3 must do both.

A forcing-function for the design was that a single Amazon S3 distributed system must support the needs of both internal Amazon applications and external developers of any application. This means that it must be fast and reliable enough to run Amazon.com’s websites, while flexible enough that any developer can use it for any data storage need.

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Intended Usage and Restrictions

Your use of this service is subject to the Amazon Web Services Customer Agreement