Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) is a storage for the internet. It is designed for large-capacity, low-cost storage provision across multiple geographical regions. Amazon S3 provides developers and IT teams with Secure, Durable and Highly Scalable object storage.
S3 is Secure because AWS provides:
- Encryption to the data that you store. It can happen in two ways:
- Client Side Encryption
- Server Side Encryption
- Multiple copies are maintained to enable regeneration of data in case of data corruption
- Versioning, wherein each edit is archived for a potential retrieval.
S3 is Durable because:
- It regularly verifies the integrity of data stored using checksums e.g. if S3 detects there is any corruption in data, it is immediately repaired with the help of replicated data.
- Even while storing or retrieving data, it checks incoming network traffic for any corrupted data packets.
S3 is Highly Scalable, since it automatically scales your storage according to your requirement and you only pay for the storage you use.
The next question which comes to our mind is,
What kind and how much of data one can store in AWS S3?
You can store virtually any kind of data, in any format, in S3 and when we talk about capacity, the volume and the number of objects that we can store in S3 are unlimited.
*An object is the fundamental entity in S3. It consists of data, key and metadata.
When we talk about data, it can be of two types-
- Data which is to be accessed frequently.
- Data which is accessed not that frequently.
Therefore, Amazon came up with 3 storage classes to provide its customers the best experience and at an affordable cost.
