Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) is a service offered byAmazon Web Services (AWS) that providesobject storage through aweb service interface.[1][2] Amazon S3 uses the same scalable storage infrastructure thatAmazon.com uses to run its e-commerce network.[3] Amazon S3 can store any type of object, which allows uses like storage for Internet applications, backups, disaster recovery, data archives,data lakes for analytics, andhybrid cloud storage. AWS launched Amazon S3 in the United States on March 14, 2006,[1][4] then in Europe in November 2007.[5]
Amazon S3 manages data with anobject storage architecture[6] which aims to providescalability,high availability, andlow latency with highdurability.[3] The basic storage units of Amazon S3 are objects which are organized into buckets. Each object is identified by a unique, user-assigned key.[7] Buckets can be managed using the console provided by Amazon S3, programmatically with the AWSSDK, or theREST application programming interface. Objects can be up to fiveterabytes in size.[8][9] Requests are authorized using anaccess control list associated with each object bucket and supportversioning[10] which is disabled by default.[11] Since buckets are typically the size of an entire file system mount in other systems, this access control scheme is very coarse-grained. In other words, unique access controls cannot be associated with individual files.[citation needed] Amazon S3 can be used to replace staticweb-hosting infrastructure with HTTP client-accessible objects,[12] index document support, and error document support.[13]The Amazon AWS authentication mechanism allows the creation of authenticated URLs, valid for a specified amount of time. Every item in a bucket can also be served as aBitTorrent feed. The Amazon S3 store can act as a seed host for atorrent and any BitTorrent client can retrieve the file. This can drastically reduce the bandwidth cost for the download of popular objects. A bucket can be configured to save HTTP log information to a sibling bucket; this can be used indata mining operations.[14]
VariousUser Mode File System (FUSE)–based file systems forLinux or other Unix-like operating systems can be used to mount an S3 bucket as a file system. The semantics of the Amazon S3 file system are not that of aPOSIX file system, so the file system may not behave entirely as expected.[15] Implementations includeRclone and AWS's own Mountpoint for S3.[16][17]
Amazon S3 offers nine different storage classes with different levels of durability, availability, and performance requirements.[18]
Amazon S3 Standard is the default. It is general purpose storage for frequently accessed data.
Amazon S3 Express One Zone is a single-digit millisecond latency storage for frequently accessed data and latency-sensitive applications. It stores data only in one availability zone.[19]
The Amazon S3 Glacier storage classes above are distinct fromAmazon Glacier, which is a separate product with its own APIs.
An object in S3 can be between 0 bytes and 5 TB. If an object is larger than 5 TB, it must be divided into chunks prior to uploading. When uploading, Amazon S3 allows a maximum of 5 GB in a single upload operation; hence, objects larger than 5 GB must be uploaded via the S3 multipart upload API.[20]
As of 2025, S3 stores 500 trillion objects, 100s ofexabytes of data, serves 200 million requests per second,[21] and peaks at about 1 petabyte per second in bandwidth.[22]
Photo hosting serviceSmugMug has used Amazon S3 since April 2006. They experienced a number of initial outages and slowdowns, but after one year they described it as being "considerably more reliable than our own internal storage" and claimed to have saved almost $1 million in storage costs.[23]
Bitcasa,[28] andTahoe-LAFS-on-S3,[29] among others, use Amazon S3 for online backup and synchronization services. In 2016, Dropbox stopped using Amazon S3 services and developed its own cloud server.[30][31]
Swiftype's CEO has mentioned that the company uses Amazon S3.[32]
The broad adoption of Amazon S3 and related tooling has given rise to competing services based on the S3API. These services use the standard programming interface but are differentiated by their underlying technologies and business models.[33] A standard interface enables better competition from rival providers and allowseconomies of scale in implementation, among other benefits.[34] Users are not required to go directly to Amazon as several storage providers such asCloudian,Backblaze B2,Wasabi offer S3-compatible storage with options of on-premises and private cloud deployments.[35] Several open-source implementations of S3-compatible object store servers can be self-hosted, such as Garage.[36][37]IBM Cloud Object Storage also offers a cloud-based S3-compatible option of Object Storage.[38]
^Crossroads of Information Technology Standards. Committee on Standards Workshop Planning, Board on Telecommunications and Computer Applications, Commission on Engineering and Technical Systems, National Research Council. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 1990. 1990. pp. 36–37.doi:10.17226/10440.ISBN978-0-309-58171-4.Archived from the original on 2014-03-25. Retrieved2014-03-25.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link)
