Amazon S3 is object-level storage, which means that if you want to change a part of a file,

you must make the change and then re-upload the entire modified file. Amazon S3 stores
data as objects within resources that are called buckets
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service offering industry-
leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance. Millions of customers of all
sizes and industries store, manage, analyze, and protect any amount of data for virtually any
use case, such as data lakes, cloud-native applications, and mobile apps. With cost-effective
storage classes and easy-to-use management features, you can optimize costs, organize and
analyze data, and configure fine-tuned access controls to meet specific business and
compliance requirements.
Amazon S3 is a managed cloud storage solution that is designed to scale seamlessly and
provide 11 9s of durability. You can store virtually as many objects as you want in a bucket,
and you can write, read, and delete objects in your bucket. Bucket names are universal
and must be unique across all existing bucket names in Amazon S3. Objects can be up to
5 TB in size. By default, data in Amazon S3 is stored redundantly across multiple facilities and
multiple devices in each facility.

The data that you store in Amazon S3 is not associated with any particular server, and you do
not need manage any infrastructure yourself. You can put as many objects into Amazon S3 as
you want. Amazon S3 holds trillions of objects and regularly peaks at millions of requests
per second.

Objects can be almost any data file, such as images, videos, or server logs. Because Amazon
S3 supports objects as large as several terabytes in size, you can even store database snapshots
as objects. Amazon S3 also provides low-latency access to the data over the internet by
Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) or Secure HTTP (HTTPS), so you can retrieve data
anytime from anywhere. You can also access Amazon S3 privately through a virtual
private cloud (VPC) endpoint. You get fine-grained control over who can access your data
by using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies, Amazon S3 bucket policies,
and even per-object access control lists.

By default, none of your data is shared publicly. You can also encrypt your data in transit and

choose to enable server-side encryption on your objects.

You can access Amazon S3 through the web-based AWS Management Console;
programmatically through the API and SDKs; or with third-party solutions, which use the
API or the SDKs.

Amazon S3 includes event notifications that enable you to set up automatic notifications when

certain events occur, such as when an object is uploaded to a bucket or deleted from a specific

bucket. Those notifications can be sent to you, or they can be used to trigger other processes,
such as AWS Lambda functions.
With storage class analysis, you can analyze storage access patterns and transition the right
data to the right storage class. The Amazon S3 Analytics feature automatically identifies the
optimal lifecycle policy to transition less frequently accessed storage to Amazon S3 Standard
– Infrequent Access (Amazon S3 Standard-IA). You can configure a storage class analysis
policy to monitor an entire bucket, a prefix, or an object tag.

When an infrequent access pattern is observed, you can easily create a new lifecycle age policy
that is based on the results. Storage class analysis also provides daily visualizations of your
storage usage in the AWS Management Console. You can export them to an Amazon S3 bucket
to analyze by using the business intelligence (BI) tools of your choice, such as Amazon
QuickSight.

Features of Amazon S3

Scalability
You can store virtually any amount of data with S3 all the way to exabytes with unmatched
performance. S3 is fully elastic, automatically growing and shrinking as you add and remove
data. There’s no need to provision storage, and you pay only for what you use.
Durability and availability
Amazon S3 provides the most durable storage in the cloud and industry leading availability.
Based on its unique architecture, S3 is designed to provide 99.999999999% (11 nines) data
durability and 99.99% availability by default, backed by the strongest SLAs in the cloud.
Security and data protection
Protect your data with unmatched security, data protection, compliance, and access control
capabilities. S3 is secure, private, and encrypted by default, and also supports numerous
auditing capabilities to monitor access requests to your S3 resources.
Lowest price and highest performance
S3 delivers multiple storage classes with the best price performance for any workload and
automated data lifecycle management, so you can store massive amounts of frequently,
infrequently, or rarely accessed data in a cost-efficient way. S3 delivers the resiliency,
flexibility, latency, and throughput, to ensure storage never limits performance.
Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) is used for storing data in the form of objects S3 is quite
different from any other file storage device or service. Amazon S3 also provides industry-
leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance. The data which is uploaded by
the user in S3, that data is stored as objects and provided an ID. Moreover, they store in shapes
like buckets and can upload a maximum file size of 5 terabytes (TB). This service is basically
designed for the online backup and archiving of data and applications on Amazon Web
Services (AWS).

Key Characteristics of Amazon S3 Storage Classes

Following are some of the key characteristics of Amazon S3 storage.

1. Durability and Availability
2. Access Latency and Performance
3. Cost-Effectiveness
4. Data Retrieval Options
5. Security and Encryption

Amazon S3 Storage Classes

This storage maintains the originality of data by inspecting it. Types of storage classes are as
follows:
1. Amazon S3 Standard
2. Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering
3. Amazon S3 Standard-Infrequent Access
4. Amazon S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access
5. Amazon S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval
6. Amazon S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval
7. Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive

1. S3 Standard: The Go-to for Frequently Accessed Data

It is used for general purposes and offers high durability, availability, and performance
object storage for frequently accessed data. S3 Standard is appropriate for a wide variety of
use cases, including cloud applications, dynamic websites, content distribution, mobile and
gaming applications, and big data analytics.

Mainly it is used for general purposes in order to maintain durability, availability, and
performance to a higher extent. Its applications are cloud applications, dynamic websites,
content distribution, mobile & gaming apps as well as big data analysis or data mining.

Ideal Use Cases for S3 Standard

Amazon S3 standard storage class is the versatile and widely used storage class in amazon S3.
Following are the some of the use cases of Amazon S3 standard class.
• Hosting Static Websites.
• Serving Content Distribution Networks (CDNs).
• Storing Frequently Accessed Data.
• Building Data Lakes and Data Warehouses.
• Backing Up Data.
• Serving Mobile and Gaming Applications.

Characteristics of S3 Standard
• Availability criteria are quite good like 99.9%.
• Improves the recovery of an object file.
• It is against the events which are a little bit tough that can affect an entire Availability Zone.
• Durability of S3 standard is 99.999999999%.

2. S3 Intelligent-Tiering: Automated Cost Optimization for Data with Unknown Access

Patterns
The first cloud storage automatically decreases the user’s storage cost. It provides very cost-
effective access based on frequency, without affecting other performances. It also manages
tough operations. Amazon S3 Intelligent – Tiering reduces the cost of granular objects
automatically. No retrieval charges are there in Amazon S3 Intelligent – Tiering.

Characteristics of S3 Intelligent-Tiering
• Required less monitoring and automatically tier charge.
• No minimum storage duration and no recovery charges are required to access the service.
• Availability criteria are quite good like 99.9%.
• Durability of S3 Intelligent- Tiering is 99.999999999%.

3. S3 Standard-Infrequent Access: Cost-Effective Storage for Less Frequently Used Data

To access the less frequently used data, users use S3 Standard-IA. It requires rapid access
when needed. We can achieve high strength, high output, and low bandwidth by using S3
Standard-IA. It is best in storing the backup, and recovery of data for a long time. It act as a
data store for disaster recovery files.

Identifying Suitable Data for S3 Standard-Infrequent Access

To choose which type of data is suitable for the for S3 standard-infrequent access.
• Access Frequency
• Data Size
• Access Latency Requirements
• Data Durability Requirements
Characteristics of S3 Standard-Infrequent Access
• High performance and same action rate.
• Very Durable in all AZs.
• Availability is 99.9% in S3 Standard-IA.
• Durability is of 99.999999999%.

4. S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval: High-Performance Archiving with Rapid Retrieval

It is an archive storage class that delivers the lowest-cost storage for data archiving and is
organized to provide you with the highest performance and with more flexibility. S3 Glacier
Instant Retrieval delivers the fastest access to archive storage. Same as in S3 standard, Data
retrieval in milliseconds .

Characteristics of S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval

• It just takes milliseconds to recover the data.
• The minimum object size should be 128KB.
• Availability is 99.9% in S3 glacier Instant Retrieval.
• Durability is of 99.999999999%.

5. S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access: Cost-Optimized Storage for Single Availability Zone

Different from other S3 Storage Classes which store data in a minimum of three Availability
Zones, S3 One Zone-IA stores data in a single Availability Zone and costs 20% less than S3
Standard-IA. It’s a very good choice for storing secondary backup copies of on-premises data
or easily re-creatable data. S3 One Zone-IA provides you the same high durability, high
throughput, and low latency as in S3 Standard.

Characteristics of S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access

• Supports SSL(Secure Sockets Layer) for data in transferring and encryption of data.
• Availability Zone destruction can damage the data.
• Availability is 99.5% in S3 one Zone- Infrequent Access.
• Durability is of 99.999999999%.

6.S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval: Balancing Cost and Retrieval Flexibility for Archiving
It provides low-cost storage compared to S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval. It is a suitable solution
for backing up the data so that it can be recovered easily a few times in a year. It just
takes minutes to access the data.

Characteristics of S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval

• Free recoveries in high quantity.
• AZs destruction can lead to difficulty in accessing data.
• when you have to retrieve large data sets , then S3 glacier flexible retrieval is best for
backup and disaster recovery use cases.
• Availability is 99.99% in S3 glacier flexible retrieval.
• Durability is of 99.999999999%.

7. Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive

The Glacier Deep Archive storage class is designed to provide long-lasting and secure long-
term storage for large amounts of data at a price that is competitive with off-premises tape
archival services that is very cheap. You no longer need to deal with expensive services.
Accessibility is very much efficient, that it can restore data within 12 hours. This storage
class is designed in such a way that users can easily get long-lasting and more secured storage
for a huge amount of data at very less cost. Efficient accessibility and can restore data within
very less time, therefore its time complexity is also efficient. S3 Glacier Deep Archive also
have the feature of objects replication.

Characteristics of S3 Glacier Deep Archive

• More secured storage.
• Recovery time is less requires less time.
• Availability is 99.99% in S3 glacier deep archive.
• Durability is of 99.999999999%.

Amazon S3 – Storage Classes

1. Amazon Storage Classes Pricing
Depending on the type of storage classes the pricing will be varied.
• S3 Standard: Storage cost $0.00059 per GB per month
• S3 Intelligent-Tiering: Storage cost $0.00012 per GB per month
• S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (IA): Storage Cost $0.00063 per GB per month
• S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access (IA): $0.00048 per GB per month
AWS S3 Lifecycle Management

Lifecycle Management is used so that objects are stored cost-effectively throughout their

lifecycle. A lifecycle configuration is a set of rules that define the actions applied by S3 to a

group of objects.

AWS S3 lifecycle configuration is a collection of rules that define various lifecycle actions that

can automatically be applied to a group of Amazon S3 objects. These actions can be either

transition actions (which makes the current version of the S3 objects transition between

various S3 storage classes) or they could be expiration actions (which defines when an S3

object expires).

Lifecycle policies:
• Use Lifecycle rules to manage your object: You can manage the Lifecycle of an object

by using a Lifecycle rule that defines how Amazon S3 manages objects during their

lifetime.

• Automate transition to tiered storage: Lifecycle allows you to transition objects to the

Standard IA storage class automatically and then to the Glacier storage class.

• Expire your objects: Using the Lifecycle rule, you can automatically expire your objects
The lifecycle defines two types of actions:

• Transition actions: When you define the transition to another storage class. For example,

you choose to transit the objects to the Standard IA storage class 30 days after you have

created them or archive the objects to the Glacier storage class 60 days after you have

created them.

S3 Transition Actions:

• Transition actions are typically a set of rules that can be configured to make current versions

of the S3 objects move/tier between various storage classes upon reaching a specific

lifetime (in number of days).

• For example, a transition lifecycle rule action can be set to automatically move Amazon

S3 objects from the default S3 standard tier to Standard-IA (Infrequent Access) 30

days after they were created in order to reduce S3 storage costs. The same rule can

also be configured to archive the same objects after another three months by

automatically moving them from S3 Standard-IA to Glacier or Glacier Deep Archive

to further reduce storage costs.

• Amazon S3 storage tier transitions can follow the waterfall model as illustrated below:

• When the lifecycle patterns of data are known clearly, customers can select specific storage
classes for the data to transition to. When the lifecycle patterns of data are not clearly
 known, data can be transitioned to the S3 Intelligent-Tiering class instead, where Amazon

S3 will manage the tiering behind the scenes.

• This ability for S3 objects to be tiered into different storage classes with different cost

structures allows organizations to potentially reduce their cloud storage costs,

throughout the data’s lifecycle.

• Consider an example of an expense claim system that frequently uploads images of

receipts to Amazon S3. These images are often frequently accessed during the first 30-

60 days of their existence for validating and processing the expense claim. But after this

initial period, where the expenses claim has been processed and paid out, the images of the

receipts are no longer frequently accessed. They can now safely be moved off to the

less-expensive S3 Infrequent Access tier to enable cost savings.

• Once the infrequent access period also elapses (for example, once a back-end quarterly

accounting cycle has completed), the images of these receipts will no longer need to be

accessed. They can now be automatically moved off to cheaper archive tiers such as Glacier

for long-term storage.

• Expiration actions: You need to define when objects expire, the Amazon S3 deletes the

expired object on your behalf.

• Similar to transition actions, expiration actions enable customers to define when the
current version of S3 objects expire (which will automatically remove them from
the S3 bucket). S3 expiration actions within the lifecycle policy allow users to
permanently delete noncurrent versions of S3 objects from the bucket or permanently
delete previously expired objects, freeing up storage space utilization and reducing
ongoing cloud storage costs.
• It is important to note that the actual removal of an expired Amazon S3 object is an
asynchronous process where there could be a delay between when an object is marked
for expiry and when it is actually removed / deleted. However, users are not charged for
the storage of expired objects.
Suppose a business generates a lot of data in the form of test files, images, audio, or videos and

the data is relevant for 30 days only. After that, you might want to transition from standard to

standard IA as storage cost is lower. After 60 days, you might want to transit to Glacier storage

class for the longtime archival. Perhaps you want to expire the object after 60 days completely,

so Amazon has a service known as Lifecycle Management, and this service exist within the S3

bucket.
Leveraging S3 Lifecycle Management Configurations to Delete S3 Objects
Amazon S3 objects, including older versions of the objects, continue to incur storage
consumption costs unless they are deleted promptly. Many organizations leveraging Amazon
S3 with versioning find that their storage costs exponentially increase due to the underlying S3
objects not actually being deleted from the underlying storage platform due to the effect of
object versioning. These costs can compound over time as new S3 objects are created / added
and existing objects are overwritten.
AWS SDK and AWS Command Line Interface or the Amazon S3 console provide ways to
delete S3 objects or expired options either manually or programmatically. However, the
process can be cumbersome and can include additional code or admin efforts to be used at scale.
S3 lifecycle configurations enable users to address this issue conveniently instead. Expiration
actions found within the Amazon S3 lifecycle configuration can be configured to automatically
delete the previous versions as well as the expired versions of S3 objects. This all happens with
no user involvement, saving significant time and effort for enterprise organizations that can
leverage this at scale to reduce their underlying storage footprint. This also reduces the
associated storage consumption costs without the need for any additional administrative
overhead.
There are three specific Amazon S3 lifecycle expiration actions that can be leveraged by
customers:
Expiring current version of the object: This configuration allows users to automatically
expire the current version of the Amazon S3 objects stored within the bucket after a specified
number of days.
In the same example of the expense claim system, we referenced above, all images of expense
receipts that are older than ‘X’ (X = number of days for the data to be retained based on the
compliance requirements) can be automatically expired from the Glacier archival storage using
this method. This will stop AWS S3 storage costs from incurring from that point onwards.
Permanently delete noncurrent version of the objects: This enables users to permanently
remove the older versions of the S3 objects inside a bucket automatically after a certain period
of time (days), with no user involvement.
Delete expired object delete markers and failed multipart uploads: This configuration
allows users to remove “delete object markers” or to stop and remove any failed multi-part
uploads, if they are not completed within a specified period (days), which will save storage
costs.
.
Important points to be remembered:

• It can be used either in conjunction with the versioning or without versioning.

• Lifecycle Management can be applied to both current and previous versions.

• The following actions can be done:

• Transition to Standard Infrequent Access storage class (after 30 days of creation date).

• Transition to Glacier storage class (after 60 days of creation date).

• It can also delete the objects permanently.