Amazon S3: Why is it so Secure & Reliable

One of the most widely used services from AWS is their Simple Storage Service, or more commonly known as S3. With industry leading scalability, data availability, security and performance, Amazon S3 allows organizations to scale easily, increase reliability, make data transfer more efficient and most importantly, save money with a ‘pay-as-you-go model’.

Data now moves at a tremendous pace through various mediums like data lakes, websites, mobile applications, IoT devices, enterprise applications etc. Amazon S3 provides access to easy-to-use management tools that helps developers organize data as well as configure it to meet specific business compliance requirements more efficiently. S3 also has a 99.99999999999 durability rate (famously known as the 11 9’s), which makes it highly reliable and secure.

Here are the main features of Amazon S3

Storage Management and Monitoring

Amazon S3 has a non-hierarchical structure and various management tools that assist business of all sizes to use their data more efficiently. By using prefixes, objects that are stored in S3 buckets can be shared seamlessly which improves collaboration between teams. With comprehensive reports like the S3 Inventory report, all stored objects can be easily categorized and retrieved through tags and metadata and encryption status. Click here to know more about storage Management and Monitoring features of S3.

Storage Analytics and Insights:

Gain valuable insights about how and when to move data into the appropriate storage class through the S3 Storage Class Analysis. This analysis uses storage access patterns to provide businesses with the insights needed to drastically improve their S3 Lifecycle policies, which reduces the overall costs. The S3 Storage Lens offers visibility across the organization to monitor activity trends, provide actionable recommendations, improve cost efficiency, and assist in the application of best practices for data protection. Click here to know more about Storage Analytics and Insights feature of the S3.

Amazon S3 Storage Classes

Amazon S3 has tailor-made different classes that can be applied to meet your unique business requirements. It also enables users to manage data throughout its lifecycle, where setting up a S3 Lifecycle policy, data transfer can be automated between different classes.

• S3 Standard for general-purpose storage of frequently accessed data
• S3 Intelligent-Tiering for data with unknown or changing access patterns
• S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA) and S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access (S3 One Zone-IA) for long-lived, but less frequently accessed data
• Amazon S3 Glacier (S3 Glacier) and Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive (S3 Glacier Deep Archive) for long-term archive and digital preservation.

Click here to know more about Storage Classes of S3.

Access Management and Security:

Amazon S3 has various tools that can grant access to other users like,

• AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to create users and manage their respective access
• Access Control Lists (ACLs) to make individual objects accessible to authorized users
• Bucket policies to configure permissions for all objects within a single S3 bucket
• S3 Access Points to simplify managing data access to shared data sets by creating access points with names and permissions specific to each application or sets of applications
• Query String Authentication to grant time-limited access to others with temporary URLs

Amazon S3 also offers a wide range of security features that can be used to block any unauthorized users from accessing your valuable data. With encryption from both server-side encryption (with three key management options) and client-side encryption for secure data transfers. Click here to know more about Access Management and Security features of the S3.

Data Processing:

The S3 Object Lambda lets users add their own code to S3 and obtain S3 GET requests to process and modify data once, it is returned to an application. Your custom code can be used to filter rows, dynamically resize images, redact confidential data, and much more. Powered by AWS Lambda functions, your code runs on infrastructure that is fully managed by AWS, eliminating the need to create and store derivative copies of your data or to run expensive proxies, all with no changes required to applications.

Click here to know more about Data Processing feature of the S3

Query in place:

Amazon S3 has efficient features that queries data without having the need to copy and load it into a separate data warehouse or analytics platform, which allows users to run big data analytics directly on your stored resources. S3 Select is an S3 feature designed to increase query performance by up to 400% and reduce querying costs by as much as 80%. It works by retrieving a subset of an object’s data (using simple SQL expressions) instead of the entire object, which can be up to 5 terabytes in size. Click here to know more about Query in place feature of the S3.

Data Transfer:

AWS offers a wide range of data transfer services which improves efficiency, availability, and reliability.

• Hybrid Cloud Storage: AWS Storage Gateway is a hybrid cloud storage service that lets you seamlessly connect and extend your on-premises applications to AWS Storage
• Online data transfer: AWS DataSync makes it easy and efficient to transfer hundreds of terabytes and millions of files into Amazon S3, up to 10x faster than open-source tools
• Offline data transfer: The AWS Snow Family is purpose-built for use in edge locations where network capacity is constrained or nonexistent and provides storage and computing capabilities in harsh environments

Customers also have the option to collaborate with third-party providers from the AWS Partner Network (APN). Click here to know more about Data Transfer feature of Amazon S3.

Performance:

• Amazon S3 provides industry leading performance for cloud object storage.
• Amazon S3 supports parallel requests, which means you can scale your S3 performance by the factor of your compute cluster, without making any customization to your application.
• Performance scales per prefix, so you can use as many prefixes as you need in parallel to achieve the required throughput. There are no limits to the number of prefixes.
• Amazon S3 performance supports at least 3,500 requests per second to add data and 5,500 requests per second to retrieve data.
• Each S3 prefix can support these request rates, making it simple to increase performance significantly.

Click here to know more about Performance of the S3.

Amazon S3 Pricing:

AWS pricing is based on paying for only what you use, without a minimum fee – which makes it a highly cost-efficient offering. There are six Amazon S3 cost components to consider when storing and managing your data:

• Storage pricing
• Request and data retrieval pricing
• Data transfer and transfer acceleration pricing
• Data management and analytics pricing
• The price to process your data with s3 object lambda.

Click here to know more about the pricing of Amazon S3.