Storage service in AWS - S3

AWS S3(Simple storage Service) is another core offering of AWS it works as a building block for many other services.

What is AWS S3?

AWS S3 is a file storage service which that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance. It is a hard disk available to us over the internet. AWS promises you can store any amount of data retrieve any amount of data, anytime with 99.999999999 of durability. It is a global service and can be used for:-

1. Backups
2. Archiving stuff
3. Storage
4. Hosting videos, audio, etc
5. Hosting static websites

Let's get familiar with the terminology used in AWS S3

S3 bucket

A bucket is just like a directory but is an AWS defined resource on which we can define some permissions, storage rules for all the files that this bucket contains. So the main use of buckets is to oraganise your files and provide settings at this level. S3 is a global service but the buckets are defined at the region level. An Amazon S3 bucket name is globally unique, and the namespace is shared by all AWS accounts. This means that after a bucket is created, the name of that bucket cannot be used by another AWS account in any AWS Region until the bucket is deleted to know. To know more about bucket naming rules follow the documentation of naming rules.

S3 Objects

AWS S3 is a key value store in which the key represents the name and the value is the file that we store. The key also represents the virtual folder structure created in the cloud it works like this s3://bucket-name/directories/filename eg
s3://logs/pythonlogs/12-2-12.txt. Here logs is our bucket name pythonlogs is the virtual directory created by S3 and 12-2-12.txt is our filename. In value we can store any object of up to 5 TB using API and we have to use multipart upload if its more than 5 GB to learn more about this see documentation. We can also upload 160GB file at once by the S3 console.

Version

It is just like git if we store same file again its stored as a new version and the previous file is not discarded.

Metadata

This is data that is stored on the object with which you can store information regarding the object.

This is a new series on AWS S3 follow along if you want to learn more about AWS S3. Next up we will do a hands on AWS S3 and get the basic knowledge by doing some exercises on it.