AWS Simple Storage Service (S3)

For that AWS provides other services like EC2 where you can provision a server of your own and build a corporate website with all the bells and whistles.

S3 is a storage service first and it provides web functionality for static sites.

A number of AWS services tie in with S3.

Services like Macie for monitoring sensitive data access, and Big Data and analytics services can take their input from the data stored in S3.

You can use it with AWS Lake Formation to tie in the data with Machine Learning.

The data on S3 can be used for archival purposes for your corporate documents.

Data that you know you don’t need frequently but still need to store can be pushed out to S3 Glaciers that are even cheaper than S3 but takes a few days to get the data back if you do need it back.

There are many ways of leveraging the data on S3.

These are just some of the common ones.

Hop on to AWS S3 and browse through their docs.

BucketsYour data that are pictures, videos, or files are all stored as objects.

The objects are stored in Buckets.

A Bucket is like a folder on your hard drive.

You create a Bucket, configure its access settings like private, public, etc.

You can also assign access rights to it as to who in your AWS environment can access it.

e.

g.

if you have your company’s backend running on AWS then you probably have different groups of users like developers, IT, clients, etc.

Not everyone should have access to all of your data.

You can configure and modify all that in a Bucket’s settings at any time.

This is called Access Control Information and it is a sub-resource.

 (A subresource is just another resource that is tied to a parent resource, and its lifecycle depends on the lifecycle of the parent.

We’ll talk about resources in a second.

)You upload all your files to that bucket through a web interface.

You get a URL for your Bucket.

If your bucket is public, you can access your files from anywhere in the world just by typing in the URL on a web browser.

If your bucket is private, you can still access it from anywhere in the world, you’ll just need to log in to your account.

The URL for a bucket comes in two different flavors — a path URL and a virtual URLA path style URL that has the following formathttp://s3-region-name.

amazonaws.

com/bucket-name e.

g.

if your bucket is called myBucket and you created it in Parishttp://s3-eu-west-3.

amazonaws.

com/myBucketA virtual URL of the above path would look like-http://myBucket.

s3-eu-west-3.

amazonaws.

com i.

e.

http://bucket-name.

s3-region-name.

amazonaws.

com In virtual url, the region-name is optional, so you also do-http://myBucket.

amazonaws.

comEvery bucket name has a unique name.

Once you’ve created a bucket with a particular name, no one in the world can use that name.

So if someone is using a name you want for your bucket — well, you’ll need to come up with a different name.

This is done so that the buckets can be globally accessed from anywhere with a link.

Same reason why two websites can’t have the same name.

If duplicates were allowed then the DNS name servers won’t be able to resolve them when you type it in.

When you’re designing your AWS, come up with a naming scheme for your buckets that is unique enough for your project.

That way you won’t spend a lot of time chasing dead ends.

Now that you know all about bucket names, here’s a quiz- (the answer is at the end of this article)If the name of your bucket is medium-articles and you created the bucket in Hong Kong( ap-east-1 ) then which of the following URL is/are valid ?1.

http://s3-ap-east-1-amazonaws.

com/medium-articles2.

http://medium-articles.

s3-ap-east-1.

amazonaws.

com3.

http://s3.

ap-east-1.

amazonaws.

com/medium-articles4.

http://medium-articles.

amazonaws.

com5.

All of the aboveARNWorking on AWS, you’re going to bump into this term often.

Buckets and objects are resources on AWS.

We talk about resources in this article on REST API.

In a nutshell, every bucket you create, and every object you upload to AWS is a resource that can be requested via a REST API.

Amazon assigns a unique name to identify each of these resources.

This is the Amazon Resource Name a.

k.

a ARNRegionsSometimes you create a bucket, and when you log in the next day you don’t see the buckets.

This is because the Buckets are region specific.

When you log into your AWS account, you get to pick which region you want to operate out of.

Regions like N.

Virginia (us-east-1), California (us-west-1), London (eu-west-2), etc.

When you pick your region, the resources you create gets created on the servers in that region.

Some resources like access rights policies are globally available but buckets are region specific.

If you create a Bucket in N.

Virginia(us-east-1) then that bucket is not available when you switch your region to Mumbai (ap-south-1).

When you log in, AWS will log into your default region which can be different from the region you created your resources in.

So if you don’t see your bucket, check the region.

Choose your region based on where you are or where you’re going to access the bucket from the most.

If you’re in California and need to access your files from California, then don’t create a bucket in Sydney ( ap-southeast-2).

Reason being latency.

If you store stuff in Sydney then your files are physically stored on a server there.

Depending on the sensitivity of your data, there may be other data compliance regulatory requirements that you’ll have to keep in mind when you’re using S3.

Some data are not allowed to leave the country and must be restricted to a particular geographic location.

Here is more on data compliance.

SummaryIn this article, we looked at what the term “highly” in highly durable, highly scalable and highly available means.

We talked about security and compliance.

We saw some of the ways you can use S3 and why using S3 like your personal hard drive might be an overkill.

We calculated how much it might cost to maintain a 512 GB drive on S3 on both S3 and Google’s Cloud Platform.

We looked at Buckets, and how they are named.

In addition, we discussed ARN and Regions.

I love AWS.

If you have any AWS related questions on how to start moving over to the cloud, let me know.

I’m an AWS Certified Solutions Architect.

Answer to the Quiz2 and 4 are correct.

1 is wrong because it has a hyphen between the region name and amazonaws.

com.

It should be http://s3-ap-east-1.

amazonaws.

com/medium-articles3 is wrong because it has a dot between the s3 and the region name.

The correct way is http://s3-ap-east-1.

amazonaws.

com/medium-articles.

. More details

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