Simple Storage Service
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What is Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)?
Amazon S3 is a cloud storage service that offers scalable object storage with a web-based interface to store and retrieve any amount of data at any time. It is designed for data archiving, backup, big data analytics, websites, mobile apps, and disaster recovery.
How does Amazon S3 store data?
Amazon S3 stores data as objects within buckets. An object consists of data, metadata, and a unique identifier. Users can organize their data with a hierarchical structure of keys within a bucket and access it via REST APIs or the AWS management console.
What is an S3 bucket?
An S3 bucket is a container used to store data in Amazon S3. Each bucket is identified with a unique name and can hold an unlimited number of objects. Buckets help organize the storage of files and determine the AWS region where data is stored.
How do you create an S3 bucket?
To create an S3 bucket, log into the AWS Management Console, navigate to the S3 service, click 'Create bucket,' and follow the steps to name the bucket, select a region, configure settings, and apply permissions before finishing the creation.
What are S3 storage classes?
S3 storage classes are configurations that help optimize storage costs by categorizing data access frequency and protection requirements. Classes include Standard, Intelligent-Tiering, Standard-IA, One Zone-IA, Glacier, and Glacier Deep Archive, each offering different durability, availability, and cost per storage and retrieval.
What is Amazon S3 Standard storage class?
Amazon S3 Standard storage class offers high durability, availability, and performance object storage for frequently accessed data. It is designed for use cases like content distribution, big data analytics, mobile and gaming applications that require low latency and high throughput.
What is Amazon S3 Glacier?
S3 Glacier is a low-cost cloud storage service for data archiving and long-term backup. It offers secure, durable storage with configurable retrieval times from a few minutes to several hours, ideal for infrequent access, compliance, and backup data retention.
How does S3 object versioning work?
S3 versioning retains multiple variants of an object in a bucket. Users can enable versioning to preserve, retrieve, and restore each stored version, allowing enhanced protection against accidental overwrites or deletions and facilitating recovery of earlier data.
What is MFA Delete in S3?
MFA Delete is a security feature in Amazon S3 that requires multi-factor authentication for deleting objects. This provides an additional layer of protection and prevents accidental or malicious deletions by requiring a physical or virtual MFA device to complete the action.
What is S3 Cross-Region Replication (CRR)?
S3 Cross-Region Replication automatically replicates objects across different AWS regions for compliance, latency reduction, backup, and disaster recovery purposes. Once enabled, every object uploaded to a source bucket is asynchronously copied to a destination bucket in another region.
How is data secured in Amazon S3?
Amazon S3 secures data through multiple layers, including access control policies, SSL/TLS for data in transit, and server-side encryption (SSE) for data at rest. Additional security includes bucket policies, IAM policies, and integration with AWS KMS for key management.
What are S3 bucket policies?
S3 bucket policies assign user permissions at the bucket level to control access and actions on objects. They are JSON-based permissions resource policies that define who can access the bucket and which actions (like upload or delete) are allowed.
How do you enable logging for an S3 bucket?
Enable logging on an S3 bucket by configuring the bucket's properties to deliver access logs to another bucket. Through the AWS Management Console, specify a target bucket, access policies for logs, and configure the logging options to track requests.
What is S3 Transfer Acceleration?
S3 Transfer Acceleration speeds up content transfers to and from Amazon S3 by routing data over AWS’s optimized network paths. This is beneficial for moving data over long distances or for time-sensitive uploads to exploit faster data transfer rates.
What is the maximum file size you can store in S3?
An individual object stored in Amazon S3 can have a maximum size of 5 terabytes (TB). For uploads larger than 5 gigabytes (GB), users should use the Multipart Upload capability, which uploads the object parts concurrently and assembles them in the cloud.
How do S3 multipart uploads work?
S3 Multipart Upload enables large object uploads by dividing the file into smaller parts and uploading them independently, enhancing performance and resilience to network failures. You can upload parts in parallel and re-upload only failed parts, improving speed and reliability.
What is Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering?
Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering automatically transitions objects between two access tiers, frequent and infrequent, to optimize costs. It is designed for data with unpredictable access patterns, ensuring the most cost-effective storage class is used without performance penalties or operational overhead.
What is AWS PrivateLink for Amazon S3?
AWS PrivateLink for S3 provides private connectivity between VPCs and Amazon S3, eliminating exposure of data to the public internet. It enhances security and performance, allowing direct access over AWS’s private network, reducing latency and bandwidth costs for S3 access.
How do you manage permissions for S3 objects?
S3 object permissions can be managed using Access Control Lists (ACLs), bucket policies, and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies. These tools specify user access levels, controlling who can read, write, delete, or list the objects within a bucket.
What is an S3 lifecycle policy?
An S3 lifecycle policy automates transitioning objects between storage classes or schedules their deletion after specific intervals. It helps manage lifecycle transitions standardization in cost optimization, archiving data to Glacier, and managing data expiry, all based on pre-configured rules.
What is S3 Select?
S3 Select allows you to query data in S3 using SQL expressions without having to load the object into your processing layer. It enables retrieval of a subset of the data, reducing the amount of data transferred and speeding up query performance.
How to protect against accidental data deletion in S3?
Protect S3 data by enabling versioning to retain object versions, configuring MFA Delete for deletion protection, using bucket policies to restrict delete privileges, and applying lifecycle policies with caution to ensure accidental data overwrite or deletion is minimized.
What is S3 event notification?
S3 event notifications automatically trigger messages or events when specific actions, like object uploads or deletions, occur in a bucket. These can send alerts to AWS services such as Lambda, SNS, or SQS for further processing or monitoring.
How are large datasets handled in S3?
Handle large datasets in S3 by using Multipart Uploads for efficient uploads, enabling Transfer Acceleration for faster data transfer, leveraging storage classes for cost-effectiveness, employing lifecycle policies for data tiering, and S3 Select for data filtering and analytical queries.
What is S3 Object Lock?
S3 Object Lock provides write-once-read-many (WORM) protection for objects, preventing deletion or modification for a specified retention period. It ensures compliance with regulatory requirements by protecting data from accidental or malicious deletion in both versioned and unversioned buckets.
How does encryption work in S3?
S3 provides encryption for data at rest using Server-Side Encryption (SSE) and Client-Side Encryption. SSE options include AWS-managed keys (SSE-S3), customer-provided keys (SSE-C), and AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) keys (SSE-KMS) for advanced key management.
What is S3 Reduced Redundancy Storage (RRS)?
Reduced Redundancy Storage (RRS) is an S3 storage option that offers lower cost for storing noncritical, easily reproducible data with lower redundancy than Standard storage class. However, RRS is deprecated in favor of other storage classes like One Zone-IA.
What happens when an S3 bucket is deleted?
Deleting an S3 bucket removes all the data it contains. Ensure that there is no remaining critical data before deletion, as this action cannot be undone. Any associated settings, including policies and configurations, are permanently lost with the bucket.
Can you host a static website on S3?
Amazon S3 can host static websites by enabling website hosting from the bucket settings. S3 serves static content directly over HTTP with options to configure custom domain names, redirection rules, and website endpoints for delivering web content efficiently.
What is bucket versioning in S3?
Bucket versioning is an S3 feature that retains multiple versions of an object, allowing you to recover from unintended actions. It tracks changes and offers restoration of previous versions, enhancing data protection against accidental deletion or overwriting.
How does Amazon S3 scale for large amounts of data?
Amazon S3 scales automatically to handle increased storage needs, supporting massive workloads without manual intervention. It provides virtually unlimited storage capacity, distributing files across multiple data centers for high availability, performance, and durability.
What are S3 pre-signed URLs?
S3 pre-signed URLs grant time-limited access to specific S3 objects for users with sufficient permissions. Generated URLs allow temporary downloading or uploading without needing AWS credentials, simplifying secure sharing of resources over the internet.
What is an S3 object?
An S3 object is the fundamental data element stored in S3, consisting of the raw data and accompanying metadata. Identified by a unique key within a bucket, objects may include files like documents, videos, or backups stored as main data units.
What are IAM roles for Amazon S3?
IAM roles in Amazon S3 provide secure access management for AWS resources without sharing user credentials. They allow applications, services, and users to assume temporary, specific permissions necessary to perform actions on S3 buckets or objects.
How do you set up cross-account access in S3?
Cross-account access in S3 is set up using bucket policies and IAM roles that explicitly grant permissions to specific AWS accounts, enabling secure sharing between different accounts. This approach controls access while maintaining account segregation.
What is a POST policy in S3?
A POST policy in S3 describes the conditions that must be met during an HTTP POST upload, including allowed bucket names, content types, and object sizes. It's used to enforce specific parameters for direct uploads via HTML forms without backend scripts.
What are the common use cases for Amazon S3?
Common use cases for S3 include data backup and recovery, disaster recovery, data archival, big data analytics, hosting static websites, serving large datasets, media storage, software delivery, and storage for IoT-generated data for further analytics.
What is Access Analyzer for S3?
Access Analyzer for S3 helps identify buckets and objects with public or shared access, providing insights to improve security. It analyzes access paths and helps enforce the principle of least privilege by highlighting unexpected public or cross-account access.
How do you retrieve data from Amazon S3 quickly?
Retrieve data quickly from Amazon S3 using features like S3 Transfer Acceleration for enhancing speed, enabling byte-range fetches for downloading specific data segments, and leveraging edge locations with Amazon CloudFront for distributing content efficiently worldwide.
What is the difference between AWS KMS and SSE-S3?
SSE-S3 uses AWS-managed keys for automatic encryption, while AWS KMS integrates with SSE-KMS for user-managed, customer-defined key policies. KMS offers more control and auditing for encrypted data, allowing users to manage, rotate, and enforce access control on encryption keys.
How does Amazon S3 ensure high durability?
Amazon S3 ensures high durability through data distribution across multiple geographically separated availability zones. Using redundancy and advanced algorithms, S3 offers 99.999999999% durability by continually checking the integrity of data and replicating objects if discrepancies are found.
What is an S3 access point?
An S3 access point is a resource creation within AWS S3 used to manage object access. It provides an easy way to configure access policies for a specific application or use case, allowing it to control access to buckets with high granularity.
How do you optimize cost on Amazon S3?
Optimize S3 costs by using the appropriate storage classes, implementing lifecycle policies for data transition and deletion, using S3 Intelligent-Tiering for unpredictable data use, controlling data retrieval processes, and monitoring usage with AWS Cost Explorer for insights.
What is the difference between Amazon S3 and Amazon EBS?
Amazon S3 provides object storage suitable for large-scale and static files, accessible via HTTP/S, while Amazon EBS offers block-level storage for EC2 instances, ideal for running databases or filesystems with lower latency and higher IOPS requirements.
What is the minimum time required for an object to be stored in S3 before transitioning to another storage class?
For objects in the Standard-IA Storage class, they must remain for at least 30 days before transitioning to another class. Similar policies apply to other storage types to ensure effective cost management and lifecycle policy compliance.
How does Amazon S3 charge services?
Amazon S3 charges for storage per GB/month, data transfer, and requests such as PUT, GET, or metadata operations. Additional fees apply for storage management features, such as Transfer Acceleration, data retrieved from Glacier or Cross-Region Replication.
What is an S3 default encryption?
S3 default encryption automatically encrypts data when it is stored in Amazon S3. When enabled, users choose server-side encryption with either AWS-managed keys (SSE-S3) or AWS Key Management Service keys (SSE-KMS) to ensure every object in the bucket is protected.