Amazon S3
By Amazon Web Services
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is a highly durable, scalable object storage service from AWS used for storing and retrieving any amount of data, from static website assets to data lake storage and backups.
Definition
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is a highly durable, scalable object storage service from AWS used for storing and retrieving any amount of data, from static website assets to data lake storage and backups.
Overview
S3 was one of the first AWS services and helped establish object storage as a foundational cloud building block: instead of files on a traditional filesystem or blocks on a disk, S3 stores data as objects (a file plus metadata) inside buckets, accessed over HTTP(S) APIs rather than a mounted filesystem. This model scales to effectively unlimited storage without capacity planning, and S3 is engineered for extremely high durability by redundantly storing data across multiple facilities. S3 offers multiple storage classes — from frequently accessed Standard storage down to cold-archive tiers — letting teams balance cost against retrieval speed depending on how often data is accessed. It underpins a huge share of AWS's ecosystem: it's a common backing store for Amazon Redshift via Spectrum, a data lake foundation for analytics and machine learning pipelines feeding tools like Amazon SageMaker, a static website and content host, and the default destination for backups, logs, and application-generated files, often alongside compute on Amazon EC2.
Key Features
- Virtually unlimited, highly durable object storage
- Multiple storage classes balancing cost and retrieval speed
- Access via simple HTTP(S) APIs and the AWS console/CLI
- Versioning and lifecycle policies for automated data management
- Fine-grained access control via bucket policies and IAM
- Static website hosting directly from a bucket
- Event notifications for triggering workflows on object changes