AWS S3 in a nutshell — Cheat sheet and compact overview

What’s up with the Buckets?

What is S3?

S3 = Simple Storage Service

• Data is stored as objects
• Unlimited storage, you don’t need to care about disk space
• With the S3 console you can easily upload and access your data

Object

Stored objects consist of the following structure:

• Key = Name of the object
• Value = Data stored as byte sequence
• Version ID= If enabled the current object version
• Metadata = Additional information about the object

The storage size for an object can be from 0 bytes to 5 terabytes.

S3 Bucket

A Bucket is like a unique namespace where you can store your objects in. You can have folders(prefixes) for structuring.

The Bucket name needs to be unique across all AWS accounts, like a domain.

Storage classes

• Standard (default) = 99.999% Availability, fast and replicated among 3 availability zones
• Intelligent Tiering = Stored objects are analyzed via machine learning to decide which storage class is used automatically. In the end the most cost effective tiering is used for your data without any additional overhead
• Standard Infrequently Accessed = Cheap for objects that don’t get accessed more than once in a month. Amazon applies additional retrieval fee.
• One Zone Infrequent Access = Objects are stored only in one availability zone with a lower availability(99.5%). Additional retrieval fee is applied. Cheaper than Standard IA.
• Glacier = Long term cold storage: Cheap and it can take minutes to hours to read objects.
• Glacier Deep Archive = Cheapest storage, but up to 12 hours for object access.

Security

• Public/Private = New created Buckets are private by default (Block all public acces in the UI)!
• Logging = Every request to a Bucket can be logged. The log files are stored in a different S3 Bucket :), even different AWS account is possible.