Amazon S3
Object storage built to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere
Companies today need the ability to simply and securely collect, store, and analyze their data at a massive scale. Amazon 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 stores data for millions of applications used by market leaders in every industry. S3 provides comprehensive security and compliance capabilities that meet even the most stringent regulatory requirements. It gives customers flexibility in the way they manage data for cost optimization, access control, and compliance. S3 provides query-in-place functionality, allowing you to run powerful analytics directly on your data at rest in S3. And Amazon S3 is the most supported storage platform available, with the largest ecosystem of ISV solutions and systems integrator partners.
Benefits
UNMATCHED DURABILITY, AVAILABILITY, & SCALABILITY
Amazon S3 runs on the world’s largest global cloud infrastructure, and was built from the ground up to deliver a customer promise of 99.999999999% of durability. Data is automatically distributed across a minimum of three physical facilities that are geographically separated within an AWS Region, and Amazon S3 can also automatically replicate data to any other AWS Region.
MOST COMPREHENSIVE SECURITY & COMPLIANCE CAPABILITIES
Amazon S3 is the only cloud storage platform that supports three different forms of encryption. S3 offers sophisticated integration with AWS CloudTrail to log, monitor and retain storage API call activities for auditing. Amazon S3 is the only cloud storage platform with Amazon Macie, which uses machine learning to automatically discover, classify, and protect sensitive data in AWS. S3 supports security standards and compliance certifications including PCI-DSS, HIPAA/HITECH, FedRAMP, EU Data Protection Directive, and FISMA, helping satisfy compliance requirements for virtually every regulatory agency around the globe.
QUERY IN PLACE
Amazon S3 allows you to run sophisticated big data analytics on your data without moving the data into a separate analytics system. Amazon Athena gives anyone who knows SQL on-demand query access to vast amounts of unstructured data. Amazon Redshift Spectrum lets you run queries spanning both your data warehouse and S3. And only AWS offers Amazon S3 Select (currently in Preview), a way to retrieve only the subset of data you need from an S3 object, which can improve the performance of most applications that frequently access data from S3 by up to 400%.
FLEXIBLE MANAGEMENT
Amazon S3 offers the most flexible set of storage management and administration capabilities. Storage administrators can classify, report and visualize data usage trends to reduce costs and improve service levels. Objects can be tagged with unique, customizable metadata so customers can see and control storage consumption, cost, and security separately for each workload. The S3 Inventory feature delivers scheduled reports about objects and their metadata for maintenance, compliance, or analytics operations. S3 can also analyze object access patterns to build lifecycle policies that automate tiering, deletion, and retention. Since Amazon S3 works with AWS Lambda, customers can log activities, define alerts, and invoke workflows, all without managing any additional infrastructure.
MOST SUPPORTED PLATFORM WITH THE LARGEST ECOSYSTEM
In addition to integration with most AWS services, the Amazon S3 ecosystem includes tens of thousands of consulting, systems integrator and independent software vendor partners, with more joining every month. And the AWS Marketplace offers 35 categories and more than 3,500 software listings from over 1,100 ISVs that are pre-configured to deploy on the AWS Cloud. AWS Partner Network partners have adapted their services and software to work with S3 for solutions like Backup & Recovery, Archiving, and Disaster Recovery. No other cloud provider has more partners with solutions that are pre-integrated to work with their service.
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 data uploads across large geographical distances. AWS Direct Connect provides consistently high bandwidth and low latency data transfer for moving 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 data transfer appliance to use on-premises to easily move volumes or files into the AWS Cloud.
Use cases
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.
DATA LAKES & 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.
Case studies
Blog posts & articles
Get started with Amazon S3
Start building with AWS
Learn more about Amazon S3
