Amazon S3 is a cloud service for storing data in files. It is mentioned that provided space on it is between 1 byte till 5 terabytes.

Characteristics of S3

Files on Amazon Simple Storage are stored in separate «buckets», in which you can create directories and subdirectories.

Buckets are stored in different regions. The following regions are available: US Standard, US West (Oregon), US West (Northern California), EU (Ireland), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), South America (Sao Paulo) and GovCloud (USA).

You can use various types of security policies: make them private, public, and also share access between users. For example, you can open the site:

bucketname.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com and store a static content there.

S3 can logically record and stack reports in a separate bucket. This is useful when many users or applications have access to the service.

Download, deletion and other operations are available through REST or SOAP. The encryption of data channel with S3 is also possible.

The BitTorrent protocol has been replaced by http as the main file downloading protocol.

A 99.999999999% integrity guarantee and 99.99% file availability guarantee per year are provided.

S3 also supports file versioning. You can always restore a file of a previous version, it means – simply roll back to the previous stage.

UPD: The namespace of the buckets names is one for all users, therefore the names of the buckets must be unique.

Interfaces

S3 can be controlled using special console.

The command line has formal and informal tools. There is a huge number of libraries for applications on S3.

Billing

S3 is paid according to the amount of data stored, requests and outgoing traffic. There is also a „Free Tier“ – 5GB of space, 20,000 download requests, 2,000 upload requests and 15 gigabytes of traffic per month for free.