Book Image

Amazon S3 Essentials

By : Sunil Gulabani
Book Image

Amazon S3 Essentials

By: Sunil Gulabani

Overview of this book

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), provides developers and IT teams with secure, durable, and highly-scalable object storage. Amazon S3 is easy to use, with a simple web services interface to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere on the web. S3 is automatically web scalable and responds to the requirements of your application and traffic, and therefore offers a key element to help companies deal dynamically with any spike in traffic for their application (such as a free e-book offer). This book starts with the basics of the Amazon S3 and its features, and you will quickly get an understanding how to use the Amazon Management Console for Amazon S3 which is the simplest way to manage Amazon S3. Next, we will cover basic operations on bucket, folder, objects. Once the basic operations are understood, you will know how to use Amazon S3 using Java SDK. Following that, you will learn about Copy Objects and Multipart copy objects for large objects size. You will also learn to manage the life cycle of bucket and how to share resources to the different domain by configuring CORS. The book will then guide you through the development and deployment of a static website on Amazon S3 using different services of Amazon. By the end of the book, you will be able to create a scalable application using Amazon S3.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Features of Amazon S3


The following are the main features of Amazon S3:

  • Allows website hosting: Amazon S3 allows users to host a website and map it to their domain. This is very cost effective, because the user pays only for what he/she uses. Moreover, the user doesn't require highly configured servers to serve the website.

  • Scalable: Amazon S3 doesn't restrict the user to any size limit for storing data. As it is a pay-as-you-go service, it stores the data, and the bill is generated accordingly. So the subscriber never faces a lack of space.

  • Reliable: Amazon S3 guarantees a server uptime of 99.9 percent. Therefore, the subscriber does not need to worry about data reliability.

  • Security: Amazon S3 provides a strong authentication mechanism where the stored data can be manipulated.

  • Standard interfaces: Amazon S3 provides the Representational State Transfer (REST) and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) web services that can be consumed by any web framework.

  • Reduced Redundancy Storage: Amazon S3 provides the subscribers with an optional feature for storing data with the Reduced Redundancy Storage (RRS) storage class. It is basically used for storing non-critical and reproducible data at lower levels of redundancy. The cost of storing on an RRS storage class is quite less as compared to the standard storage class.

  • Torrent tracking and seeding: Amazon S3 can act as a torrent tracker, and seed the files from your machine.

  • Share the data with a temporary URL: Amazon S3 provides the subscriber the ability to share a URL, which auto-expires after a period of time. This helps the subscriber in sharing the data for a minimal period of time. Other users cannot use that data after the URL expires.

  • Logging: It provides the logging of all activities that are performed on bucket. This makes it easy for the subscriber to audit the activities on the bucket if he so wishes. Generally, when a subscriber hosts a website on Amazon S3, he enables the logging feature to track the activities.

  • Versioning: Amazon S3 allows storing of multiple versions of an object. It is basically used for recovering old data that is lost unintentionally.

  • Security: Amazon S3 provides security on buckets and objects. While creating the buckets, you can provide access control lists for other users of the bucket who can create, update, delete, or list objects. You can even set the geographical location of your data.

  • Integration: Amazon S3 can be integrated with several other services such as Amazon EC2, Amazon EBS, Amazon Glacier, and many other applications. Generally, developers use Amazon S3 for storing images, videos, or documents, and for accessing them via HTTP Get.