Amazon S3
Object storage built to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance. This means customers of all sizes and industries can use it to store and protect any amount of data for a range of use cases, such as websites, mobile applications, backup and restore, archive, enterprise applications, IoT devices, and big data analytics. Amazon S3 provides easy-to-use management features so you can organize your data and configure finely-tuned access controls to meet your specific business, organizational, and compliance requirements. Amazon S3 is designed for 99.999999999% (11 9's) of durability, and stores data for millions of applications for companies all around the world.
Benefits
Industry-leading performance, scalability, availability, and durability
Scale your storage resources up and down to meet fluctuating demands, without upfront investments or resource procurement cycles. Amazon S3 is designed for 99.999999999% (11 9’s) of data durability because it automatically creates and stores copies of all S3 objects across multiple systems. This means your data is available when needed and protected against failures, errors, and threats.
Learn about S3 data durability »
Wide range of cost-effective storage classes
Save costs without sacrificing performance by storing data across the S3 Storage Classes, which support different data access levels at corresponding rates. You can use S3 Storage Class Analysis to discover data that should move to a lower-cost storage class based on access patterns, and configure an S3 Lifecycle policy to execute the transfer. You can also store data with changing or unknown access patterns in S3 Intelligent-Tiering, which tiers objects based on changing access patterns and automatically delivers cost savings.
Learn more about the S3 Storage Classes »
Unmatched security, compliance, and audit capabilities
Store your data in Amazon S3 and secure it from unauthorized access with encryption features and access management tools. You can also use Amazon Macie to identify sensitive data stored in your S3 buckets and detect irregular access requests. Amazon S3 maintains compliance programs, such as PCI-DSS, HIPAA/HITECH, FedRAMP, EU Data Protection Directive, and FISMA, to help you meet regulatory requirements. AWS also supports numerous auditing capabilities to monitor access requests to your S3 resources.
Learn more about S3 security and compliance »
Management tools for granular data control
Classify, manage, and report on your data using features, such as: S3 Storage Class Analysis to analyze access patterns; S3 Lifecycle policies to transfer objects to lower-cost storage classes; S3 Cross-Region Replication to replicate data into other regions; S3 Object Lock to apply retention dates to objects and protect them from deletion; and S3 Inventory to get visbility into your stored objects, their metadata, and encryption status. You can also use S3 Batch Operations to change object properties and perform storage management tasks for billions of objects. Since Amazon S3 works with AWS Lambda, you can log activities, define alerts, and automate workflows without managing additional infrastructure.
Learn more about S3 storage management features »
Query-in-place services for analytics
Run big data analytics across your S3 objects (and other data sets in AWS) with our query-in-place services. Use Amazon Athena to query S3 data with standard SQL expressions and Amazon Redshift Spectrum to analyze data that is stored across your AWS data warehouses and S3 resources. You can also use S3 Select to retrieve subsets of object metadata, instead of the entire object, and improve query performance by up to 400%.
Learn more about query in place »
Most supported cloud storage service
Store and protect your data in Amazon S3 by working with a partner from the AWS Partner Network (APN) — the largest community of technology and consulting cloud services providers. The APN recognizes migration partners that transfer data to Amazon S3 and storage partners that offer S3-integrated solutions for primary storage, backup and restore, archive, and disaster recovery. You can also purchase an AWS-integrated solution directly from the AWS Marketplace, which lists over 250 storage-specific offerings.
Learn about the APN and AWS Marketplace »
How it works — S3 Batch Operations (in preview)
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S3 Batch Operations lets you manage billions of objects at scale with just a few clicks in the Amazon S3 Management Console or a single API request. With S3 Batch Operations, you can make changes to object metadata and properties, or perform other storage management tasks, such as copying objects between buckets, replacing object tag sets, modifying access controls, and restoring archived objects from S3 Glacier — instead of taking months to develop custom applications to perform these tasks.
Use cases
Backup and restore
Build scalable, durable, and secure backup and restore solutions with Amazon S3 and other AWS services, such as S3 Glacier, Amazon EFS, and Amazon EBS, to augment or replace existing on-premises capabilities. AWS and APN partners can help you meet Recovery Time Objectives (RTO), Recovery Point Objectives (RPO), and compliance requirements. With AWS, you can back up data already in the AWS Cloud or use AWS Storage Gateway, a hybrid storage service, to send backups of on-premises data to AWS.
Learn more about backup and restore »
Disaster recovery (DR)
Protect critical data, applications, and IT systems that are running in the AWS Cloud or in your on-premises environment without incurring the expense of a second physical site. With Amazon S3 storage, S3 Cross-Region Replication, and other AWS compute, networking, and database services, you can create DR architectures in order to quickly and easily recover from outages caused by natural disasters, system failures, and human errors.
Learn more about DR »
Archive
Retire physical infrastructure, and archive data with S3 Glacier and S3 Glacier Deep Archive (coming soon). These S3 Storage Classes retain objects long-term at the lowest rates. Simply create an S3 Lifecycle policy to archive objects throughout their lifecycles, or upload objects directly to the archival storage classes. With S3 Object Lock, you can apply retention dates to objects to protect them from deletions, and meet compliance requirements. Unlike tape libraries, S3 Glacier lets you restore archived objects in as little as one minute for expedited retrievals and 3-5 hours for standard retrievals. Bulk data restores from S3 Glacier and all restores from S3 Glacier Deep Archive are completed within 12 hours.
Learn more about archiving »
Data lakes and big data analytics
Accelerate innovation by creating a data lake in Amazon S3, and extract valuable insights using query-in-place, analytics, and machine learning tools. You can also use AWS Lake Formation to quickly create a data lake, and centrally define and enforce security, governance, and auditing policies. The service collects data across your databases and S3 resources, moves it into a new data lake in Amazon S3, and cleans and classifies it using machine learning algorithms. All AWS resources can be scaled up to accommodate your expanding data stores — without upfront investments.
Learn more about data lakes and AWS Lake Formation »
Hybrid cloud storage
Create a seamless connection between on-premises applications and Amazon S3 with AWS Storage Gateway in order to reduce your data center footprint, and leverage the scale, reliability, and durability of AWS, as well as AWS’ innovative machine learning and analytics capabilities. You can also automate data transfers between on-premises storage and Amazon S3 by using AWS DataSync, which can transfer data at speeds up to 10 times faster than open-source tools. Another way to enable a hybrid cloud storage environment is to work with a gateway provider from the APN. You can also transfer files directly into and out of Amazon S3 with AWS Transfer for SFTP — a fully managed service that enables secure file exchanges with third parties.
Learn more about hybrid storage, AWS DataSync, and AWS Transfer for SFTP »
Cloud-native application data
Build fast, cost-effective mobile and Internet-based applications by using AWS services and Amazon S3 to store production data. With Amazon S3, you can upload any amount of data and access it anywhere in order to deploy applications faster and reach more end users. Storing data in Amazon S3 also means you have access to the latest AWS developer tools and services for machine learning and analytics to innovate and optimize your cloud-native applications.
Learn more about cloud-native applications »
Case studies
Related content
WHAT'S NEW
Coming Soon — S3 Glacier Deep Archive for Long-Term Data Retention
28 NOV 2018
AWS NEWS BLOG
New — Automatic Cost Optimization for Amazon S3 via Intelligent Tiering
by Jeff Barr | 26 NOV 2018
WHAT'S NEW
Amazon S3 Introduces S3 Batch Operations for Object Management
26 NOV 2018
WHAT'S NEW
AWS Announces Amazon S3 Object Lock in all AWS Regions
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AWS ARCHITECTURE BLOG
S3 & S3 Glacier Launch Announcements for Archival Workloads
by Matt Sidley | 26 NOV 2018
NEWS BLOG
Amazon S3 Block Public Access — Another Layer of Protection for Your Accounts and Buckets
16 NOV 2018
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