Q: What is Amazon S3?

Amazon S3 is object storage built to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere on the Internet. It’s a simple storage service that offers an extremely durable, highly available, and infinitely scalable data storage infrastructure at very low costs.

Q: How much data can I store in Amazon S3?

The total volume of data and number of objects you can store are unlimited. Individual Amazon S3 objects can range in size from a minimum of 0 bytes to a maximum of 5 terabytes. The largest object that can be uploaded in a single PUT is 5 gigabytes. For objects larger than 100 megabytes, customers should consider using theMultipart Uploadcapability.

Q: What storage classes does Amazon S3 offer?

Amazon S3 offers a range of storage classes designed for different use cases. There are four highly durable storage classes including Amazon S3 Standard for general purpose storage of frequently accessed data, Amazon S3 Standard-Infrequent Access or Amazon S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access for long-lived, but less frequently accessed data, and Amazon Glacier for long-term archive. You can learn more about these storage classes on theAmazon S3 Storage Classes page.

Q: How is Amazon S3 data organized?

Amazon S3 is a simple key-based object store. When you store data, you assign a unique object key that can later be used to retrieve the data. Keys can be any string, and they can be constructed to mimic hierarchical attributes. Alternatively, you can use S3 Object Tagging to organize your data across all of your S3 buckets and/or prefixes.

Q: How reliable is Amazon S3?

Amazon S3 gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, highly available, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. The S3 Standard storage class is designed for 99.99% availability, the S3 Standard-IA storage class is designed for 99.9% availability, and the S3 One Zone-IA storage class is designed for 99.5% availability. All of these storage classes are backed by theAmazon S3 Service Level Agreement.

Q: Where is my data stored?

You specify an AWS Region when you create your Amazon S3 bucket. For S3 Standard, S3 Standard-IA, and Amazon Glacier storage classes, your objects are automatically stored across multiple devices spanning a minimum of three Availability Zones, each separated by miles across an AWS Region. Objects stored in the S3 One Zone-IA storage class are stored redundantly within a single Availability Zone in the AWS Region you select. Please refer toRegional Products and Servicesfor details of Amazon S3 service availability by AWS Region.

Q: What is an AWS Region?

An AWS Region is a geographic location where AWS provides multiple, physically separated and isolated Availability Zones which are connected with low latency, high throughput, and highly redundant networking.

Q: What is an AWS Availability Zone (AZ)?

An AWS Availability Zone is an isolated location within an AWS Region. Within each AWS Region, S3 operates in a minimum of three AZs, each separated by miles to protect against local events like fires, floods, etc.

Amazon S3 Standard, S3 Standard-Infrequent Access, and Amazon Glacier storage classes replicate data across a minimum of three AZs to protect against the loss of one entire AZ. This remains true in Regions where fewer than three AZs are publicly available. Objects stored in these storage classes are available for access from all of the AZs in an AWS Region.

The Amazon S3 One Zone-IA storage class replicates data within a single AZ. Data stored in this storage class is susceptible to loss in an AZ destruction event.

Q: How do I decide which AWS Region to store my data in?

There are several factors to consider based on your specific application. You may want to store your data in a Region that…

  • ...is near to your customers, your data centers, or your other AWS resources in order to reduce data access latencies.

  • ...is remote from your other operations for geographic redundancy and disaster recovery purposes.

  • ...enables you to address specific legal and regulatory requirements.

  • ...allows you to reduce storage costs. You can choose a lower priced region to save money. For S3 pricing information, please visit the
    S3 pricing page

Q: How secure is my data in Amazon S3?

Amazon S3 is secure by default. Upon creation, only the resource owners have access to Amazon S3 resources they create. Amazon S3 supports user authentication to control access to data. You can use access control mechanisms such as bucket policies and Access Control Lists (ACLs) to selectively grant permissions to users and groups of users. The Amazon S3 console highlights your publicly accessible buckets, indicates the source of public accessibility, and also warns you if changes to your bucket policies or bucket ACLs would make your bucket publicly accessible.

You can securely upload/download your data to Amazon S3 via SSL endpoints using the HTTPS protocol. If you need extra security you can use the Server-Side Encryption (SSE) option to encrypt data stored at rest. You can configure your Amazon S3 buckets to automatically encrypt objects before storing them if the incoming storage requests do not have any encryption information. Alternatively, you can use your own encryption libraries to encrypt data before storing it in Amazon S3.

Q: How secure is my data in Amazon S3?

Amazon S3 is secure by default. Upon creation, only the resource owners have access to Amazon S3 resources they create. Amazon S3 supports user authentication to control access to data. You can use access control mechanisms such as bucket policies and Access Control Lists (ACLs) to selectively grant permissions to users and groups of users. The Amazon S3 console highlights your publicly accessible buckets, indicates the source of public accessibility, and also warns you if changes to your bucket policies or bucket ACLs would make your bucket publicly accessible.

You can securely upload/download your data to Amazon S3 via SSL endpoints using the HTTPS protocol. If you need extra security you can use the Server-Side Encryption (SSE) option to encrypt data stored at rest. You can configure your Amazon S3 buckets to automatically encrypt objects before storing them if the incoming storage requests do not have any encryption information. Alternatively, you can use your own encryption libraries to encrypt data before storing it in Amazon S3.

Q: How can I control access to my data stored on Amazon S3?

Customers may use four mechanisms for controlling access to Amazon S3 resources: Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies, bucket policies, Access Control Lists (ACLs), and Query String Authentication. IAM enables organizations with multiple employees to create and manage multiple users under a single AWS account. With IAM policies, customers can grant IAM users fine-grained control to their Amazon S3 bucket or objects while also retaining full control over everything the users do. With bucket policies, customers can define rules which apply broadly across all requests to their Amazon S3 resources, such as granting write privileges to a subset of Amazon S3 resources. Customers can also restrict access based on an aspect of the request, such as HTTP referrer and IP address. With ACLs, customers can grant specific permissions (i.e. READ, WRITE, FULL_CONTROL) to specific users for an individual bucket or object. With Query String Authentication, customers can create a URL to an Amazon S3 object which is only valid for a limited time. For more information on the various access control policies available in Amazon S3, please refer to theAccess Control topicin theAmazon S3 Developer Guide.

Q: How secure is my data in Amazon S3?

Amazon S3 is secure by default. Upon creation, only the resource owners have access to Amazon S3 resources they create. Amazon S3 supports user authentication to control access to data. You can use access control mechanisms such as bucket policies and Access Control Lists (ACLs) to selectively grant permissions to users and groups of users. The Amazon S3 console highlights your publicly accessible buckets, indicates the source of public accessibility, and also warns you if changes to your bucket policies or bucket ACLs would make your bucket publicly accessible.

You can securely upload/download your data to Amazon S3 via SSL endpoints using the HTTPS protocol. If you need extra security you can use the Server-Side Encryption (SSE) option to encrypt data stored at rest. You can configure your Amazon S3 buckets to automatically encrypt objects before storing them if the incoming storage requests do not have any encryption information. Alternatively, you can use your own encryption libraries to encrypt data before storing it in Amazon S3.

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Q: How can I control access to my data stored on Amazon S3?

Customers may use four mechanisms for controlling access to Amazon S3 resources: Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies, bucket policies, Access Control Lists (ACLs), and Query String Authentication. IAM enables organizations with multiple employees to create and manage multiple users under a single AWS account. With IAM policies, customers can grant IAM users fine-grained control to their Amazon S3 bucket or objects while also retaining full control over everything the users do. With bucket policies, customers can define rules which apply broadly across all requests to their Amazon S3 resources, such as granting write privileges to a subset of Amazon S3 resources. Customers can also restrict access based on an aspect of the request, such as HTTP referrer and IP address. With ACLs, customers can grant specific permissions (i.e. READ, WRITE, FULL_CONTROL) to specific users for an individual bucket or object. With Query String Authentication, customers can create a URL to an Amazon S3 object which is only valid for a limited time. For more information on the various access control policies available in Amazon S3, please refer to theAccess Control topicin theAmazon S3 Developer Guide.

Q: Does Amazon S3 support data access auditing?

Yes, customers can optionally configure an Amazon S3 bucket to create access log records for all requests made against it. Alternatively, customers who need to capture IAM/user identity information in their logs can configureAWS CloudTrail Data Events.

These access log records can be used for audit purposes and contain details about the request, such as the request type, the resources specified in the request, and the time and date the request was processed.

Q: What options do I have for encrypting data stored on Amazon S3?

You can choose to encrypt data using SSE-S3, SSE-C, SSE-KMS, or a client library such as theAmazon S3 Encryption Client. All four enable you to store sensitive data encrypted at rest in Amazon S3.

SSE-S3 provides an integrated solution where Amazon handles key management and key protection using multiple layers of security. You should choose SSE-S3 if you prefer to have Amazon manage your keys.

SSE-C enables you to leverage Amazon S3 to perform the encryption and decryption of your objects while retaining control of the keys used to encrypt objects. With SSE-C, you don’t need to implement or use a client-side library to perform the encryption and decryption of objects you store in Amazon S3, but you do need to manage the keys that you send to Amazon S3 to encrypt and decrypt objects. Use SSE-C if you want to maintain your own encryption keys, but don’t want to implement or leverage a client-side encryption library.

SSE-KMS enables you to useAWS Key Management Service(AWS KMS) to manage your encryption keys. Using AWS KMS to manage your keys provides several additional benefits. With AWS KMS, there are separate permissions for the use of the master key, providing an additional layer of control as well as protection against unauthorized access to your objects stored in Amazon S3. AWS KMS provides an audit trail so you can see who used your key to access which object and when, as well as view failed attempts to access data from users without permission to decrypt the data. Also, AWS KMS provides additional security controls to support customer efforts to comply with PCI-DSS, HIPAA/HITECH, and FedRAMP industry requirements.

Using an encryption client library, such as theAmazon S3 Encryption Client, you retain control of the keys and complete the encryption and decryption of objects client-side using an encryption library of your choice. Some customers prefer full end-to-end control of the encryption and decryption of objects; that way, only encrypted objects are transmitted over the Internet to Amazon S3. Use a client-side library if you want to maintain control of your encryption keys, are able to implement or use a client-side encryption library, and need to have your objects encrypted before they are sent to Amazon S3 for storage.

For more information on using Amazon S3 SSE-S3, SSE-C, or SSE-KMS, please refer to the topic on Using Encryption in theAmazon S3 Developer Guide.

Q: What is an Amazon VPC Endpoint for Amazon S3?

An Amazon VPC Endpoint for Amazon S3 is a logical entity within a VPC that allows connectivity only to S3. The VPC Endpoint routes requests to S3 and routes responses back to the VPC.

Q: Can I allow a specific Amazon VPC Endpoint access to my Amazon S3 bucket?

You can limit access to your bucket from a specific Amazon VPC Endpoint or a set of endpoints using Amazon S3 bucket policies. S3 bucket policies now support a condition, aws:sourceVpce, that you can use to restrict access. For more details and example policies, readUsing VPC Endpoints.

Q: What is Amazon Macie?

Amazon Macie is anAI-powered security servicethat helps you prevent data loss by automatically discovering, classifying, and protecting sensitive data stored in Amazon S3. Amazon Macie uses machine learning to recognize sensitive data such as personally identifiable information (PII) or intellectual property, assigns a business value, and provides visibility into where this data is stored and how it is being used in your organization. Amazon Macie continuously monitors data access activity for anomalies, and delivers alerts when it detects risk of unauthorized access or inadvertent data leaks.

Q: How durable is Amazon S3?

Amazon S3 Standard, S3 Standard–IA, S3 One Zone-IA, and Amazon Glacier are all designed to provide 99.999999999% durability of objects over a given year. This durability level corresponds to an average annual expected loss of 0.000000001% of objects. For example, if you store 10,000,000 objects with Amazon S3, you can on average expect to incur a loss of a single object once every 10,000 years. In addition, Amazon S3 Standard, S3 Standard-IA, and Amazon Glacier are all designed to sustain data in the event of an entire S3 Availability Zone loss.

As with any environment, the best practice is to have a backup and to put in place safeguards against malicious or accidental deletion. For S3 data, that best practice includes secure access permissions, Cross-Region Replication, versioning, and a functioning, regularly tested backup.

Q: How are Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier designed to achieve 99.999999999% durability?

Amazon S3 Standard, S3 Standard-IA, and Amazon Glacier storage classes redundantly store your objects on multiple devices across a minimum of three Availability Zones (AZs) in an Amazon S3 Region before returning SUCCESS. The S3 One Zone-IA storage class stores data redundantly across mutliple devices within a single AZ. These services are designed to sustain concurrent device failures by quickly detecting and repairing any lost redundancy, and they also regularly verify the integrity of your data using checksums.

Q: What checksums does Amazon S3 employ to detect data corruption?

Amazon S3 uses a combination of Content-MD5 checksums and cyclic redundancy checks (CRCs) to detect data corruption. Amazon S3 performs these checksums on data at rest and repairs any corruption using redundant data. In addition, the service calculates checksums on all network traffic to detect corruption of data packets when storing or retrieving data.

Q: What is Versioning?

Versioning allows you to preserve, retrieve, and restore every version of every object stored in an Amazon S3 bucket. Once you enable Versioning for a bucket, Amazon S3 preserves existing objects anytime you perform a PUT, POST, COPY, or DELETE operation on them. By default, GET requests will retrieve the most recently written version. Older versions of an overwritten or deleted object can be retrieved by specifying a version in the request.

Q: How does Versioning protect me from accidental deletion of my objects?

When a user performs a DELETE operation on an object, subsequent simple (un-versioned) requests will no longer retrieve the object. However, all versions of that object will continue to be preserved in your Amazon S3 bucket and can be retrieved or restored. Only the owner of an Amazon S3 bucket can permanently delete a version. You can set Lifecycle rules to manage the lifetime and the cost of storing multiple versions of your objects.

Q: Can I setup a trash, recycle bin, or rollback window on my Amazon S3 objects to recover from deletes and overwrites?

You can use Lifecycle rules along with Versioning to implement a rollback window for your Amazon S3 objects. For example, with your versioning-enabled bucket, you can set up a rule that archives all of your previous versions to the lower-cost Glacier storage class and deletes them after 100 days, giving you a 100-day window to roll back any changes on your data while lowering your storage costs.

Q: How can I ensure maximum protection of my preserved versions?

Versioning’sMulti-Factor Authentication (MFA)Delete capability can be used to provide an additional layer of security. By default, all requests to your Amazon S3 bucket require your AWS account credentials. If you enable Versioning with MFA Delete on your Amazon S3 bucket, two forms of authentication are required to permanently delete a version of an object: your AWS account credentials and a valid six-digit code and serial number from an authentication device in your physical possession. To learn more about enabling Versioning with MFA Delete, including how to purchase and activate an authentication device, please refer to theAmazon S3 Technical Documentation.

Q: Why would I choose to use S3 Standard-IA?

S3 Standard-IA is ideal for data that is accessed less frequently, but requires rapid access when needed. S3 Standard-IA is ideally suited for long-term file storage, older sync and share storage, and other aging data.

Q: How do I get my data into S3 Standard-IA?

There are two ways to get data into S3 Standard-IA. You can directly PUT into S3 Standard-IA by specifying STANDARD_IA in the x-amz-storage-class header. You can also set Lifecycle policies to transition objects from the S3 Standard to the S3 Standard-IA storage class.

Q: Is there a minimum storage duration charge for S3 Standard-IA?

S3 Standard-IA is designed for long-lived but infrequently accessed data that is retained for months or years. Data that is deleted from S3 Standard-IA within 30 days will be charged for a full 30 days. Please see theAmazon S3 pricing pagefor information about S3 Standard-IA pricing.

Q: Is there a minimum object storage charge for S3 Standard-IA?

S3 Standard-IA is designed for larger objects and has a minimum object storage charge of 128KB. Objects smaller than 128KB in size will incur storage charges as if the object were 128KB. For example, a 6KB object in S3 Standard-IA will incur S3 Standard-IA storage charges for 6KB and an additional minimum object size fee equivalent to 122KB at the S3 Standard-IA storage price. Please see theAmazon S3 pricing pagefor information about S3 Standard-IA pricing.

Q: What is S3 One Zone-IA storage class?

S3 One Zone-IA storage class is an Amazon S3 storage class that customers can choose to store objects in a single availability zone. S3 One Zone-IA storage redundantly stores data within that single Availability Zone to deliver storage at 20% less cost than geographically redundant S3 Standard-IA storage, which stores data redundantly across multiple geographically separate Availability Zones.

S3 One Zone-IA offers a 99% available SLA and is also designed for eleven 9’s of durability within the Availability Zone. But, unlike the S3 Standard and S3 Standard-IA storage classes, data stored in the S3 One Zone-IA storage class will be lost in the event of Availability Zone destruction.

S3 One Zone-IA storage offers the same Amazon S3 features as S3 Standard and S3 Standard-IA and is used through the Amazon S3 API, CLI and console. S3 One Zone-IA storage class is set at the object level and can exist in the same bucket as S3 Standard and S3 Standard-IA storage classes. You can use S3 Lifecycle policies to automatically transition objects between storage classes without any application changes.

Q: Are there differences between how Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3 work with Availability Zone-specific resources?

Yes. Amazon EC2 provides you the ability to pick the AZ to place resources, such as compute instances, within a region. When you use S3 One Zone-IA, S3 One Zone-IA assigns an AWS Availability Zone in the region according to available capacity.

Q: How much disaster recovery protection do I forgo by using S3 One Zone-IA?

Each Availability Zone uses redundant power and networking. Within an AWS Region, Availability Zones are on different flood plains, earthquake fault zones, and geographically separated for fire protection. S3 Standard and S3 Standard-IA storage classes offer protection against these sorts of disasters by storing your data redundantly in multiple Availability Zones. S3 One Zone-IA offers protection against equipment failure within an Availability Zone, but it does not protect against the loss of the Availability Zone, in which case, data stored in S3 One Zone-IA would be lost. Using S3 One Zone-IA, S3 Standard, and S3 Standard-IA options, you can choose the storage class that best fits the durability and availability needs of your storage.

Q: Does Amazon S3 provide capabilities for archiving objects to lower cost storage options?

Yes, Amazon S3 enables you to utilize Amazon Glacier’s extremelylow-cost storage service for data archival. Amazon Glacier stores data for as little as $0.004 per gigabyte per month. To keep costs low yet suitable for varying retrieval needs, Amazon Glacier provides three options for access to archives, ranging from a few minutes to several hours. Some examples of archive uses cases include digital media archives, financial and healthcare records, raw genomic sequence data, long-term database backups, and data that must be retained for regulatory compliance.

Q: How can I store my data using the Amazon Glacier option?

You can useLifecycle rules to automatically archive sets of Amazon S3 objects to Amazon Glacier based on object age. Use the Amazon S3 Management Console, the AWS SDKs, or the Amazon S3 APIs to define rules for archival. Rules specify a prefix and time period. The prefix (e.g. “logs/”) identifies the object(s) subject to the rule. The time period specifies either the number of days from object creation date (e.g. 180 days) or the specified date after which the object(s) should be archived. Any S3 Standard, S3 Standard-IA, or S3 One Zone-IA objects which have names beginning with the specified prefix and which have aged past the specified time period are archived to Amazon Glacier. To retrieve Amazon S3 data stored in Amazon Glacier, initiate a retrieval job via the Amazon S3 APIs or Management Console. Once the retrieval job is complete, you can access your data through an Amazon S3 GET object request.

For more information on using Lifecycle rules for archival to Amazon Glacier, please refer to theObject Archivaltopic in the Amazon S3 Developer Guide.

Q: How can I retrieve my objects that are archived in Amazon Glacier?

To retrieve Amazon S3 data stored in Amazon Glacier, initiate a retrieval request using the Amazon S3 APIs or the Amazon S3 Management Console. The retrieval request creates a temporary copy of your data in the S3 RRS or S3 Standard-IA storage class while leaving the archived data intact in Amazon Glacier. You can specify the amount of time in days for which the temporary copy is stored in S3. You can then access your temporary copy from S3 through an Amazon S3 GET request on the archived object.

Q: What is "Query in Place" functionality?

Amazon S3 allows customers to run sophisticated queries against data stored without the need to move data into a separate analytics platform. The ability to query this data in place on Amazon S3 can significantly increase performance and reduce cost for analytics solutions leveraging S3 as a data lake. S3 offers multiple query in place options, including S3 Select, Amazon Athena, and Amazon Redshift Spectrum, allowing you to choose one that best fits your use case. You can even use Amazon S3 Select with AWS Lambda to build serverless apps that can take advantage of the in-place processing capabilities provided by S3 Select.

Q: What is S3 Select?

S3 Select is an Amazon S3 feature that makes it easy to retrieve specific data from the contents of an object using simple SQL expressions without having to retrieve the entire object. You can use S3 Select to retrieve a subset of data using SQL clauses, like SELECT and WHERE, from objects stored in CSV, JSON, or Apache Parquet format. It also works with objects that are compressed with GZIP or BZIP2 (for CSV and JSON objects only), and server-side encrypted objects.

Q: What can I do with S3 Select?

You can use S3 Select to retrieve a smaller, targeted data set from an object using simple SQL statements. You can use S3 Select with AWS Lambda to build serverless applications that use S3 Select to efficiently and easily retrieve data from Amazon S3 instead of retrieving and processing entire object. You can also use S3 Select with Big Data frameworks, such as Presto, Apache Hive, and Apache Spark to scan and filter the data in Amazon S3.

Q: Why should I use S3 Select?

S3 Select provides a new way to retrieve specific data using SQL statements from the contents of an object stored in Amazon S3 without having to retrieve the entire object. S3 Select simplifies and improves the performance of scanning and filtering the contents of objects into a smaller, targeted dataset by up to 400%. With S3 Select, you can also perform operational investigations on log files in Amazon S3 without the need to operate or manage a compute cluster.

Q: What is Amazon Athena?

Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that makes it easy toanalyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL queries. Athena is serverless, so there is no infrastructure to setup or manage, and you can start analyzing data immediately. You don’t even need to load your data into Athena, it works directly with data stored in any S3 storage class. To get started, just log into the Athena Management Console, define your schema, and start querying. Amazon Athena uses Presto with full standard SQL support and works with a variety of standard data formats, including CSV, JSON, ORC, Apache Parquet and Avro. While Athena is ideal for quick, ad-hoc querying and integrates with Amazon QuickSight for easy visualization, it can also handle complex analysis, including large joins, window functions, and arrays.

Q: What is Amazon Redshift Spectrum?

Amazon Redshift Spectrum is a feature of Amazon Redshift that enables you torun queries against exabytes of unstructured data in Amazon S3 with no loading or ETL required. When you issue a query, it goes to the Amazon Redshift SQL endpoint, which generates and optimizes a query plan. Amazon Redshift determines what data is local and what is in Amazon S3, generates a plan to minimize the amount of Amazon S3 data that needs to be read, requests Redshift Spectrum workers out of a shared resource pool to read and process data from Amazon S3.

Redshift Spectrum scales out to thousands of instances if needed, so queries run quickly regardless of data size. And, you can use the exact same SQL for Amazon S3 data as you do for your Amazon Redshift queries today and connect to the same Amazon Redshift endpoint using the same BI tools. Redshift Spectrum lets you separate storage and compute, allowing you to scale each independently. You can setup as many Amazon Redshift clusters as you need to query your Amazon S3 data lake, providing high availability and limitless concurrency. Redshift Spectrum gives you the freedom to store your data where you want, in the format you want, and have it available for processing when you need it.

Q: What can I do with Amazon S3 event notifications?

Amazon S3 event notifications enable you to run workflows, send alerts, or perform other actions in response to changes in your objects stored in S3. You can use S3 event notifications to set up triggers to perform actions including transcoding media files when they are uploaded, processing data files when they become available, and synchronizing S3 objects with other data stores. You can also set up event notifications based on object name prefixes and suffixes. For example, you can choose to receive notifications on object names that start with “images/."

Q: What is S3 Transfer Acceleration?

Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration enables fast, easy, and secure transfers of files over long distances between your client and your Amazon S3 bucket. S3 Transfer Acceleration leverages Amazon CloudFront’s globally distributed AWS Edge Locations. As data arrives at an AWS Edge Location, data is routed to your Amazon S3 bucket over an optimized network path.

Q: How should I choose between S3 Transfer Acceleration and Amazon CloudFront’s PUT/POST?

S3 Transfer Acceleration optimizes the TCP protocol and adds additional intelligence between the client and the S3 bucket, making S3 Transfer Acceleration a better choice if a higher throughput is desired. If you have objects that are smaller than 1GB or if the data set is less than 1GB in size, you should consider using Amazon CloudFront's PUT/POST commands for optimal performance.

Q: How should I choose between S3 Transfer Acceleration and AWS Snow Family (Snowball, Snowball Edge, and Snowmobile)?

The AWS Snow Family is ideal for customers moving large batches of data at once. The AWS Snowball has a typical 5-7 days turnaround time. As a rule of thumb, S3 Transfer Acceleration over a fully-utilized 1 Gbps line can transfer up to 75 TBs in the same time period. In general, if it will take more than a week to transfer over the Internet, or there are recurring transfer jobs and there is more than 25Mbps of available bandwidth, S3 Transfer Acceleration is a good option. Another option is to use both: perform initial heavy lift moves with an AWS Snowball (or series of AWS Snowballs) and then transfer incremental ongoing changes with S3 Transfer Acceleration.

Q: Why should I use object tags?

Object tags are a tool you can use to enable simple management of your S3 storage. With the ability to create, update, and delete tags at any time during the lifetime of your object, your storage can adapt to the needs of your business. These tags allow you to control access to objects tagged with specific key-value pairs, allowing you to further secure confidential data for only a select group or user. Object tags can also be used to label objects that belong to a specific project or business unit, which could be used in conjunction with S3 Lifecycle policies to manage transitions to other storage classes (S3 Standard-IA, S3 One Zone-IA, and Amazon Glacier) or with S3 Cross-Region Replication to selectively replicate data between AWS Regions.

Q: How can I update the object tags on my objects?

Object tags can be changed at any time during the lifetime of your S3 object, you can use either the AWS Management Console, the REST API, the AWS CLI, or the AWS SDKs to change your object tags. Note that all changes to tags outside of the AWS Management Console are made to the full tag set. If you have five tags attached to a particular object and want to add a sixth, you need to include the original five tags in that request.

Q: What is Storage Class Analysis?

With Storage Class Analysis, you can analyze storage access patterns and transition the right data to the right storage class. This new S3 feature automatically identifies infrequent access patterns to help you transition storage to S3 Standard-IA. You can configure a Storage Class Analysis policy to monitor an entire bucket, prefix, or object tag. Once an infrequent access pattern is observed, you can easily create a new S3 Lifecycle age policy based on the results. Storage Class Analysis also provides daily visualizations of your storage usage on the AWS Management Console that you can export to an S3 bucket to analyze using business intelligence tools of your choice such as Amazon QuickSight.

Q: What is S3 Inventory?

The S3 Inventory report provides a scheduled alternative to Amazon S3’s synchronous List API. You can configure S3 Inventory to provide a CSV or ORC file output of your objects and their corresponding metadata on a daily or weekly basis for an S3 bucket or prefix. You can simplify and speed up business workflows and big data jobs with S3 Inventory. You can also use S3 inventory to verify encryption and replication status of your objects to meet business, compliance, and regulatory needs.

Q: How do I use S3 Inventory?

You can use S3 Inventory as a direct input into your application workflows or Big Data jobs. You can also query S3 Inventory using Standard SQL language with Amazon Athena, Amazon Redshift Spectrum, and other tools such as Presto, Hive, and Spark.

Q: What is S3 Lifecycle management?

S3 Lifecycle management provides the ability to define the lifecycle of your object with a predefined policy and reduce your cost of storage. You can set a lifecycle transition policy to automatically migrate objects stored in the S3 Standard storage class to the S3 Standard-IA, S3 One Zone-IA, and/or Amazon Glacier storage classes based on the age of the data. You can also set lifecycle expiration policies to automatically remove objects based on the age of the object. You can set a policy for multipart upload expiration, which expires incomplete multipart uploads based on the age of the upload.

Q: What can I do with Lifecycle management policies?

As data matures, it can become less critical, less valuable, and/or subject to compliance requirements. Amazon S3 includes an extensive library of policies that help you automate data migration processes between storage classes. For example, you can set infrequently accessed objects to move into lower cost storage classes (like S3 Standard-IA or S3 One Zone-IA) after a period of time. After another period, those objects can be moved into Amazon Glacier for archive and compliance. If policy allows, you can also specify a lifecycle policy for object deletion. These rules can invisibly lower storage costs and simplify management efforts. These policies also include good stewardship practices to remove objects and attributes that are no longer needed to manage cost and optimize performance.

Q: What is Amazon S3 Cross-Region Replication (CRR)?

CRR is an Amazon S3 feature that automatically replicates data between AWS Regions. With CRR, you can set up replication at a bucket level, a shared prefix level, or an object level using S3 object tags. You can use CRR to provide lower-latency data access in different geographic regions. CRR can also help if you have a compliance requirement to store copies of data hundreds of miles apart.

Q: How do I get started with IPv6 on Amazon S3?

You can get started by pointing your application to Amazon S3’s new “dual-stack”endpoint, which supports access over both IPv4 and IPv6. In most cases, no further configuration is required for access over IPv6, because most network clients prefer IPv6 addresses by default.

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