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.

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.

• 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.

• 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.

Pricing

Getting Started with Amazon S3

• 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.

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.

Common Use Cases

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

Resources

Developer Resources

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• Getting Started Guide
• AWS Management Console
• WSDL
• Documentation
• Release Notes
• Sample Code & Libraries
• Developer Tools
• Articles & Tutorials
• Community Forum

Additional Product Information

• FAQs
• Amazon S3 Service Level Agreement
• Amazon Web Services Customer Agreement
• Service Health Dashboard

Related Services

• AWS Import/Export
• Amazon CloudFront
• Amazon DevPay
• AWS Premium Support

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.

Intended Usage and Restrictions

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