Amazon is known as a huge global retailer, with millions of items and extensive digital services. Not only is Amazon a popular place to shop, but it’s also a leader in cutting-edge technology, from automated services to cloud storage, and so much more.
So, if you like to stay up-to-date on everything Amazon does tech-wise, you may be wondering: what is an Amazon S3 Bucket? It crossed my mind as well, so keep reading to see what I discovered!
Key Takeaways
What Is Amazon S3 Bucket In 2022?
Amazon S3 Bucket is a cloud object storage solution offered through Amazon Web Services in 2022. Amazon S3 is short for Amazon Simple Storage Service, which is used to safely store any amount of data from websites, mobile apps, IoT devices, enterprises, and more. S3 buckets are containers for objects, another term for files and the associated metadata.
If you’re still curious about Amazon S3 Buckets, keep reading for all you need to know about these cloud storage options, including how buckets work, and why this solution from Amazon Web Services is a top choice!
What Does Amazon S3 Do?
Amazon S3 offers object storage service that stands out for its security, scalability, and data availability.
Used by companies big and small, Amazon S3 stores and protects data with optimized management features for smarter cloud storage.
Amazon S3 uses buckets and objects, which are files and metadata.
Anything that you want to store on Amazon S3 gets placed into a bucket, and there are different storage classes depending on data access requirements.
For example:
- S3 Standard – mission-critical data for regular access
- S3 Standard IA – cost-effective storage for data you only need occasionally
- S3 One Zone-IA – cost-saving for infrequent data access
- S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval – inexpensive for data you rarely need
Those are just a few examples, as the list goes on to cover a wide range of cloud data storage needs, from the information you need to access daily, to deep archive data you seldom need.
Through these different storage classes, Amazon S3 offers more efficient organization and secure data access.
This serves to reduce the reliance on physical servers, and allows companies to stay connected around the world.
What Is Amazon S3 Bucket Intelligent-Tiering?
Amazon S3 Bucket Intelligent-Tiering gives companies the ability to store data without changing access activity, as it automatically moves the data buckets throughout four access tiers to optimize costs.
In other words, instead of having to manually update access permissions on all your data, Amazon S3 keeps track of it for you, adjusting tier levels based on what information you regularly access.
Out of the four S3 access tiers, two are low-latency for both daily and infrequent use, while the other two are opt-in archives for data you must keep but rarely need to access.
Keep in mind that Amazon S3 Bucket Intelligent-Tiering is just one of the software’s smart storage management features.
This helps fulfill regulatory requirements and maintain the appropriate copies.
There’s also the S3 Lifecycle policy that can be configured to meet your specific needs for object management and storage.
With this, you can move objects to different storage levels or expire objects and buckets you no longer require.
What Are Amazon S3 Bucket Features?
In addition to Amazon S3 Bucket Intelligent-Tiering, there are several other key features of these digital data storage containers.
These innovative bucket properties include:
- Bucket tags – bucket tags are like labels for data storage containers, which you can allocate AWS costs to.
- Bucket versioning – maintain multiple object versions in the same bucket through versioning, which is available, but must be enabled on new buckets.
- Default encryption – this feature automates server encryption, so objects are encrypted before saving, and decrypted upon download.
- Object lock – S3 Object Lock prevents bucket objects from being overwritten or deleted for a certain timeframe, or even indefinitely.
- Server access log – Although Amazon S3 doesn’t log server access by default, this feature can be enabled for detailed records of server requests.
- Notifications – you can enable event notifications for certain actions, such as when specific objects are moved to new buckets. When you create an event notification, you can specify the settings to ensure you only receive notifications you actually want.
How Much Do Amazon S3 Buckets Cost?
Using Amazon S3 for cloud storage is often more affordable than you might think, because you only need to pay for what you use.
Unlike competitors that charge a fixed fee for cloud storage, even if you don’t use that much, Amazon S3 offers flexibility.
This way, you can stick with the basic features and access levels, or pay more for advanced storage needs.
Amazon Web Services has an outline of S3 Pricing based on location and the total amount of storage used.
Generally, prices start at around $0.01 per GB per month, and there is no minimum charge.
Because you pay to store objects in Amazon S3 buckets, there are a few cost components to consider:
- Storage pricing
- Request/data retrieval pricing
- Data transfer and acceleration pricing
- Analytics and data management pricing
- Replication pricing
- S3 Object Lambda data processing pricing
Keep in mind that you pay to move objects across different buckets.
However, it’s easy to get a better idea of your final costs with the AWS Pricing Calculator, which will estimate your ideal S3 budget.
To find out more, you can also read our posts on what is Amazon Drive, what is Amazon Photos, and is Amazon better than eBay.
Conclusion
Out of all the cloud storage services available today, Amazon S3 Buckets are one of the most popular, which makes sense, considering the wide range of secure cost-saving features that help businesses both big and small.
Buckets are an integral part of Amazon’s S3 Simple Storage Service, which is available through Amazon Web Services. This object storage service lets users organize files and metadata called objects in numerous different buckets with assigned access levels for optimal security.