Since its launch in 2006 as one of the first services of Amazon Web Services, Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) has fundamentally changed the way organizations store and manage their data. By providing virtually unlimited storage capacity with high durability, availability, and scalability as a web service, S3 lowered the barriers to entry and made large-scale data storage accessible to companies of all sizes.
Today, S3 is one of the most widely-used cloud storage platforms in the world, trusted by millions of customers to store trillions of objects. According to AWS, S3 now holds over 100 trillion objects and regularly peaks at millions of requests per second [^1]. As the backbone of AWS‘s storage offerings, S3 has become an essential piece of infrastructure powering use cases from web and mobile applications, to IoT, machine learning, analytics, and archiving.
Under the Hood: How S3 Works
At its core, S3 provides a simple web services interface that allows you to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere on the web. You store your data as objects within buckets, which are essentially containers for your objects. Each object consists of a file and optionally any metadata describing that file [^2].
To scale and protect your data, S3 automatically distributes it across a minimum of three physical facilities within an AWS Region that are geographically separated by at least 10 kilometers. This multi-site replication provides an impressive 99.999999999% durability, meaning if you store 10 million objects in S3, you can expect to lose only a single object every 10,000 years [^1].
When an object is stored in a bucket, redundant copies are instantly created and distributed to the other facilities in the region. This allows S3 to sustain concurrent device failures by quickly detecting and repairing any lost redundancy, and also enables fast, local access to your data.
S3 provides read-after-write consistency for PUT requests of new objects, meaning you can retrieve an object immediately after it is first stored. For overwrite PUTS and DELETES, S3 offers eventual consistency, so updates take some time to propagate [^2].
To optimize performance, S3 doesn‘t place any limits on the number of objects you can store or the amount of data you can upload. You can request S3 to scale your request rates seamlessly to thousands of requests per second for even the largest workloads. For uploading large objects, S3 supports multipart uploads that parallelize putting an object as a set of parts, maximizing throughput.
On the retrieval side, S3 allows you to fetch entire objects or specify byte ranges to retrieve just the portion of data you need, which can save bandwidth and improve performance. Advanced capabilities like S3 Select even let you filter the contents of your objects and retrieve just the subset of data you need, further optimizing performance.
Flexible Storage Classes for Any Workload
Not all data needs to be immediately available all the time. To help you optimize costs for different use cases, S3 offers a range of storage classes with varying levels of availability, durability, and access times:
- S3 Standard: The default option, offering high availability and millisecond access times for frequently accessed data.
- S3 Intelligent-Tiering: Automatically moves data between a high-access and low-access tier based on usage patterns.
- S3 Standard-IA: For infrequently accessed data that still requires high availability and millisecond access times.
- S3 One Zone-IA: Stores data in a single availability zone at 20% less cost than Standard-IA, for infrequently accessed, non-critical data.
- S3 Glacier: Secure, durable, and low-cost storage for data archiving, with data retrieval in minutes or hours.
- S3 Glacier Deep Archive: The lowest cost option for long-term retention of data that will be accessed rarely and is retrieved within 12 hours.
You can easily transition your data between these classes manually or by setting lifecycle policies that will automatically migrate objects based on predefined rules, such as frequency of access or age. In fact, a typical S3 object lifecycle often involves progressively moving it to lower-cost tiers as it ages and is less frequently accessed.
Enabling Data Lakes and Analytics
The explosion of data from an ever-expanding variety of sources has made data lakes an increasingly common pattern for cost-effectively storing massive amounts of raw data in its native format. S3 has become the de facto storage service for building data lakes on AWS thanks to its virtually unlimited scalability, industry-leading durability, and support for diverse data types and sources.
With an S3-based data lake, you can ingest structured and unstructured data at any scale from databases, streams, web applications, IoT devices, and more. You can then run big data analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to gain insights from your data using services like Amazon EMR, Redshift, and Athena that integrate directly with S3.
For example, you can query data directly from S3 using SQL or Spark with Amazon Athena, a serverless interactive query service. Athena works directly with data stored in S3 without needing to load it into a separate system. You can also use S3 as the storage layer for an Amazon Redshift data warehouse, or process vast amounts of S3 data with distributed computing frameworks like Hadoop and Spark on Amazon EMR clusters.
Many organizations are building their data lakes on S3 to break down data silos, gain agility, and enable new analytics and ML use cases:
- Netflix uses Amazon S3 to store and analyze over 100 petabytes of data, generating insights that drive their content and product decisions [^3].
- Lyft built a multi-petabyte data lake on S3 that allows them to create features and machine learning models to enhance their service and operations [^4].
- Expedia Group moved its on-premises data lake to S3 to improve scalability and performance while reducing costs by 50% [^5].
Powering Cloud-Native Applications
In addition to serving as a repository for data, S3 is also commonly used to store and distribute static web content and media assets as part of modern web and mobile applications. S3‘s limitless scale, high availability, and support for multi-part uploads allow you to reliably host images, videos, and other user-generated content without having to manage any infrastructure.
S3 is also deeply integrated with Amazon CloudFront, a fast content delivery network (CDN) service that securely delivers your static and dynamic web content to viewers across the globe with low latency and high transfer speeds. You can cache frequently accessed objects in CloudFront edge locations for fast delivery to your users while reducing the load on your S3 buckets.
Many leading web properties and applications are powered by S3 today:
- Dropbox stores and serves more than 90% of its user data from S3, taking advantage of its durability and elasticity [^6].
- Airbnb hosts 10 million images on S3 and uses it as the storage layer for its data warehouse, data lake, and machine learning pipelines [^7].
- Slack relies on S3 to store and serve billions of files shared by users on its collaboration platform, leveraging its scalability and reliability [^8].
Keeping Your Data Secure and Compliant
S3 provides a rich set of security and compliance capabilities that allow you to extend your data protection policies to the cloud. By default, all S3 buckets are private, with access controlled at the bucket and object level by using a combination of IAM policies, bucket policies, and bucket and object access control lists (ACLs).
For sensitive data, you can set up S3 buckets with default encryption using AES-256, the same encryption standard used by top government agencies. You can also enforce your own encryption keys using the AWS Key Management Service. S3 supports SSL for data in transit, and you can even require multi-factor authentication for deleting objects to prevent accidental deletions.
From an auditing and compliance perspective, S3 integrates with AWS CloudTrail to log every access request made to your buckets and objects for security analysis and operational troubleshooting. S3 is also certified for a wide range of industry and geographic compliance standards, including PCI-DSS, HIPAA, FedRAMP, and EU Data Protection Directive.
To further protect your data, S3 offers replication features that automatically copy objects between buckets in different AWS Regions or within the same region. Cross-region replication allows you to maintain copies of your data in other regions for compliance, lower latency, or disaster recovery, while same-region replication can help you aggregate logs from multiple locations or mirror data between test and production environments.
Cost Optimizations and Best Practices
One of the key advantages of using a cloud storage service like S3 is the ability to trade capital expenses for variable expenses and pay only for what you use. With S3, there are no minimum fees or upfront commitments. You pay for the storage you use, the requests you make, and the amount of data transferred out of an AWS Region.
To optimize your S3 costs, it‘s important to regularly monitor and analyze your usage patterns using tools like AWS Cost Explorer and S3 Storage Lens. You can set up lifecycle policies to automatically move infrequently accessed data to lower-cost storage classes, and use Intelligent-Tiering to let S3 optimize your storage costs by moving data based on access patterns.
It‘s also a best practice to organize your data by lifecycles and access patterns using prefixes (e.g. "logs/", "archives/") and object tags to make lifecycle management easier. For latency-sensitive workloads, consider enabling S3 Transfer Acceleration to maximize upload speeds by routing traffic through the AWS edge network.
When hosting web content from S3, you can use the S3 website endpoint to access your objects instead of the REST API endpoint to avoid incurring request fees. And if you‘re making a large number of S3 requests, consider using the S3 Batch Operations feature to call a single API that performs the specified operation on a list of objects rather than making individual requests.
Conclusion
From startups to large enterprises, Amazon S3 has become the storage service of choice for millions of customers thanks to its unmatched scalability, durability, availability, and flexibility. Whether you‘re building cloud-native applications, hosting web content, running big data analytics, or simply archiving data for the long term, S3 provides a simple and cost-effective way to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere.
As data continues to grow exponentially and new use cases emerge, S3 will undoubtedly continue to evolve and add capabilities to meet the needs of its customers. With a proven track record of virtually no downtime and industry-leading durability, S3 has earned the trust of many of the world‘s largest organizations to keep their data safe and available.
By taking advantage of S3‘s flexible storage classes, rich security and compliance controls, and deep integrations with data and analytics services, you can build a modern data storage architecture that is cost-optimized, secure, and primed for innovation. With the ability to store and access data at any scale, the only limit to what you can achieve with S3 is your imagination.
[^1]: Amazon S3 Fact Sheet[^2]: Amazon S3 Documentation
[^3]: How Netflix Optimized Storage and Replaced Hadoop Clusters with Amazon S3
[^4]: Lyft‘s Data Journey with Amazon Web Services
[^5]: Expedia Group Reduces Costs by 50% by Moving to an AWS Data Lake
[^6]: Storing Hundreds of Millions of User Files on S3
[^7]: Airbnb Case Study
[^8]: Slack Case Study
