Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) makes it simple and practical to collect, store, and analyze data - regardless of format – all at massive scale. S3 is object storage built to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere – web sites and mobile apps, corporate applications, and data from IoT sensors or devices. It is designed to deliver 99.999999999% durability, and has many customers each storing billions of objects and exabytes of data. You can use it for media storage and distribution, as the “data lake” for big data analytics, as a backup target, and as the storage tier for serverless computing applications. It is ideal for capturing data like mobile device photos and videos, mobile and other device backups, machine backups, machine-generated log files, IoT sensor streams, and high-resolution images, and making it available for machine learning to other AWS services and third party applications for analysis, trending, visualization, and other processing.
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Most Durable & Reliable Platform for Your Data
The S3 service runs on the world’s largest global cloud infrastructure, comprised of Availability Zones (AZs) and Regions around the world. These Availability Zones offer the ability to operate production applications and databases which are more highly available, fault tolerant, and scalable than would be possible from a single data center. Data written to S3 is redundantly stored across three AZs and multiple devices within each AZ to achieve 99.999999999% durability.
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High Performance at Massive Scale
Amazon S3 is the largest-scale object storage service of any cloud infrastructure provider, with a total storage capacity that Gartner says "dwarfs the other vendors" of cloud infrastructure. S3 automatically scales performance so applications don’t slow down as data grows. You can deploy applications that reach more users faster because S3 stores any amount of content and lets them access it from anywhere.
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Query in Place
Amazon S3 is the only cloud storage platform that allows you to run sophisticated big data analytics directly on your data at rest without requiring you to extract the data and load it into a separate analytics system. You can query S3 data without any additional infrastructure using Amazon Athena or Amazon Redshift Spectrum, and only pay for the queries you run. This makes analysis of vast amounts of unstructured data accessible to anyone that can use SQL, and makes it far more cost effective than traditional Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) processes.
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Easy, Flexible Data Transfer
You can choose from the widest range of options to transfer your data into (or out of) Amazon S3. S3’s simple and reliable APIs make it easy to transfer data over the Internet. Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration is ideal for larger objects that need to be uploaded across large geographical distances. AWS Direct Connect provides consistently high bandwidth and low latencies for transferring large amounts of data to AWS using a dedicated network connection. You can use AWS Snowball and AWS Snowball Edge appliances for petabyte-scale data transfer, or AWS Snowmobile for even larger datasets. AWS Storage Gateway provides you a physical or virtual appliance to use on-premises to easily move volumes or files into the AWS Cloud.
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Powerful Management Made Simple
Once you have your data on Amazon S3, you have the most complete set of storage management and administration capabilities available in the cloud. With S3, you can use policies to match your financial goals, compliance regulations, and corporate business policies. S3’s powerful policy engine means you can manage your storage by your business goal, instead of relying on the disparate capabilities offered by different legacy providers.
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Most Comprehensive Suite of Security & Compliance Capabilities
Amazon S3 helps protect your data against both internal and external threats and maintain regulatory compliance, with support for more security standards and compliance certifications than any other cloud platform. S3 includes a broad range of certifications including PCI-DSS, HIPAA/HITECH, FedRAMP, SEC Rule 17-a-4, EU Data Protection Directive, FISMA, and many more for virtually every agency around the globe.
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Broadest & Deepest Ecosystem
In addition to integration with most AWS services, the Amazon S3 ecosystem includes tens of thousands of consulting/systems integrator and technology/independent software vendor AWS Partner Network partners who have adapted their services and software to work with S3 for solutions like Backup & Recovery, Archiving, and Disaster Recovery. And the AWS Marketplace offers 35 categories and more than 3,500 software listings from over 1,100 ISVs. Over ten thousand new partners joined the AWS Partner Network in the past 12 months, including thousands of new Technology and Consulting Partners.
Backup & Recovery
Amazon S3 offers a highly durable, scalable, and secure destination for backing up and archiving your critical data. You can use S3’s versioning capability to provide even further protection for your stored data. You can also define lifecycle rules to automatically migrate less frequently accessed data to S3 Standard - Infrequent Access and archive sets of objects to Amazon Glacier.
Data Archiving
Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier provide a range of storage classes to meet the needs of compliance archives for regulated industries or active archives for organizations who need fast, infrequent access to archive data. Amazon Glacier Vault Lock provides write-once-read-many (WORM) storage to meet compliance requirements for records retention. Lifecycle policies make transitioning data from Amazon S3 to Amazon Glacier simple, helping automate the transition based on customer-defined policies.
Big Data Analytics
Whether you’re storing pharmaceutical or financial data, or multimedia files such as photos and videos, Amazon S3 can be used as your data lake for big data analytics. Amazon Web Services offers a comprehensive portfolio of services to help you manage big data by reducing costs, scaling to meet demand, and increasing the speed of innovation.
Hybrid Cloud Storage
The AWS Storage Gateway helps you build hybrid cloud storage, augmenting your existing local storage environment with the durability and scale of Amazon S3. Use it to burst a workload from your site into the cloud for processing and then bring the results back. Tier colder or less valuable data off of your primary storage into the cloud to lower costs and extend your on-prem investment. Or simply use it to incrementally move data into S3 as a part of backup or migration projects.
Cloud-native Application Data
Amazon S3 provides high performance, highly available storage that makes it easy to scale and maintain cost-effective mobile and Internet-based apps that run fast. With S3, you can add any amount of content and access it from anywhere, so you can deploy applications faster and reach more customers.
Disaster Recovery
Amazon S3’s highly durable, secure, global infrastructure offers a robust disaster recovery solution designed to provide superior data protection. Cross-Region Replication (CRR) automatically replicates every S3 object to a destination bucket located in a different AWS region.
It's easy to get started with Amazon S3. Follow our console walkthrough to provision your first S3 bucket in a few clicks.
AWS Free Tier includes 5GB storage, 20,000 Get Requests, and 2,000 Put Requests with Amazon S3.