Amazon Web Services
Object Storage — Amazon S3
Store unlimited objects durably and cheaply, with tiered classes and fine-grained access.
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is an object store: you put and get objects (files up to 5 TB) addressed by a key inside a bucket. It is not a filesystem — there are no real folders, just key prefixes. S3 is designed for 11 nines of durability by replicating each object across multiple devices and AZs, and serves as the backbone for data lakes, backups, static sites, and media.
A gigantic valet coat-check that never runs out of hooks. You hand over an item and get a ticket (the key); rarely claimed coats are quietly moved to a cheaper basement room (Glacier), and nothing is ever lost.
Key Concepts
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Cost is controlled with storage classes: Standard for hot data, Intelligent-Tiering to auto-move objects by access pattern, Standard-IA / One Zone-IA for infrequent access, and Glacier / Deep Archive for cold archival at very low cost but slow retrieval. Lifecycle rules transition or expire objects automatically. Security is layered: block public access by default, bucket policies and IAM for authorization, and SSE-S3/SSE-KMS for encryption at rest.