Just Store It – the Truth Behind Amazon S3 Hype

Published: July 17, 2017 5 min. read
Svitla Team
By Svitla Team
Cloud Development Solutions
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Nowadays businesses have to deal with huge amounts of data. When customers face this problem they try to find an efficient solution for safe, accessible and elastic storage service. Cloud storage market provides users with a range of different opportunities. But one particular service still remains on the top.

When our customers ask for a piece of advice about the best way to store data, we usually recommend Amazon S3 service. And there are several good reasons for this choice.

Amazon launched its cloud story at the beginning of the 2000s. It was the time when they tried to solve the problem of scaling, elasticity and dynamic growth. The solution, firstly designed for personal needs, was so successful, that the company decided to provide others with this service worldwide. Actually, Amazon was the one who gave a kick to the whole cloud infrastructure market.

Amazon S3 – Store It Simple

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) is designed for this particular need – to store and retrieve any amount of data from any web source. S3 provides object storage with a web service interface.

Amazon Web Services is special because of its scale and a wide variety of solutions. Its growth is highly dynamic, each year it provides programmers with solutions and innovations, absolutely new for the whole market. According to the company, this approach to innovations helps make infrastructure easy to handle. Simply speaking, Amazon wants users to pay more attention to the new product they make and forget about routine operations, which become automatic.

Cloud technologies, in general, provide ordinary users with an opportunity to store and use files within a simple infrastructure that won’t go down because of an overload.

To put it simply, it becomes easy for anyone to give access to a massive file link to hundreds of thousands of people and have no fear of putting the site down when all these people start downloading simultaneously.

Any user can expand this infrastructure almost to infinity. Imagine if you need the same amount of technical support in your own place, it will cost you a spaceship. Cloud solution makes it much cheaper.

Amazon S3 remains the preferred cloud solution for all these demands. Why is it still prevailing? Well, the answer consists of three simple points.

Three “Yes” to Amazon S3

Amazon S3 service was introduced in 2006. Nowadays this service is more versatile and extended. But at the beginning of the 2000s, this cloud storage service raised a huge wave of interest even with its limited solution pack. Now S3 offers integration with the customer’s own data centers, as well as prolonged data storage. For example, when it comes to massive archives which require storage for a long time.

Amazon launched its cloud service infrastructure with the storage solution minding that there’s no way data storage demand would get weaker in time. Analytics shows that the storage service market is going to increase and raise new waves in the cloud niche. The reason is simple. There’s no way one will stop requiring some secure place to store all the data this century provides.So according to the Gartner’s analytics Amazon nowadays stores 1,6 times more data than all the other cloud providers put together.

But there are 3 specific features which put Amazon S3 on the top of the clouds.

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Durability

Amazon storage infrastructure is designed the way it can provide 99.999999999% durable data storage. This means if you have 10,000 files, you can lose 1 file every 10 mln years.

Accessibility

Amazon infrastructure includes a ramified regional network of data centers, which means information gets faster from one place to another, but this also includes wide opportunities to get different prices for solutions according to a specific region. This regional network helps store data in any chosen region (sometimes businesses require particular data storage places).

Scalability

S3 offers storage for large amounts of data. The largest file one can store is 5 terabytes. This storage is designed to be unlimited in essence. This means you can store as much data as you are ready to pay for. And it doesn’t hurt your performance or accessibility.

Amazon S3 also offers a specific serverless solution. You can place a static website in your storage and forget about scaling or workload. No matter how many people visit your website, this solution supports the load without going down. And in this particular case, you pay only for your storage.

In general, Amazon S3 remains on the top of the storage solutions for several simple reasons. It’s safe. It’s regionally ramified. It’s elastic and almost unlimited. And it can offer a huge number of connected services on the basis of this storage system so that a customer gets full-scale modern infrastructure.

No magic. Only reasonable solutions and successful practice. 

Written by
Oleksandr Bormetskyi
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FAQ

Is Amazon S3 free?

Amazon S3 does not come entirely free; it operates on a pay-for-what-you-use pricing model. You pay for the storage that you use and the requests made. New customers can get started with Amazon S3 using a limited amount of storage and request capacity for no charge under the 12-month Free Tier offer from AWS. Usage above this level will be charged based on the amount of storage used, plus data transfer and requests made—meaning yes, you can test it for free at first, but in the long run or big time, S3 is a paid service.

What is S3 best used for?

Amazon S3 belongs to a family of object storage services capable of storing and retrieving any amount of data over the web, keeping it highly available and extremely durable. In high-durability use cases, it enables persistence with 99.999999999% durability. It scales out without restriction on the amount of data that can be stored and offers performance matching that of any on-premise solution to hit very large amounts of data, not just today, but also as your needs grow in the future. Additionally, it’s well-suited for static site hosting, as it offers serverless hosting for various loads, and you only pay for the storage used.

What is the general purpose of S3?

Amazon S3, or Simple Storage Service, is designed to deliver highly scalable, durable, and accessible object storage. In general, it allows storing and retrieving any amount of data at any time from anywhere on the web. It comes with an elastic infrastructure that grows automatically as your needs increase, allowing businesses to focus on their core product rather than routine storage operations. In other words, S3 is a strong bedrock foundation for many different cloud-based applications and requirements related to data storage.

Is Amazon S3 open source?

Amazon S3 is not an open-source service. It is a proprietary cloud storage service offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS). Although AWS makes APIs and SDKs available for developers to work with S3, the underlying infrastructure and software belong to and are controlled by Amazon. This spells out that users get to take advantage of a strong, secure infrastructure from Amazon without having to deal with any nuances in the management of the storage system.