What do "keys" mean in Amazon S3?

Amazon S3 lets us store objectsfiles to buckets. Any resource stored in an S3 can be uniquely identified with its URI, for example:

s3://my-bucket/my-folder/my-file.txt

Here, a file (my-file.txt) is stored inside the organized my-folder container in the my-bucket bucket.

Now, while defining the URI, it can be broken down into two sections:

• the bucket name
• the “key”

The bucket name refers to the object’s name in which the object is stored, while the key represents the FULL path of the object INSIDE the bucket. So, the above URI can be broken down into two parts:

Key can be further broken down into two nomenclatures, “prefix” and “object name”.

The actual object name is referred to as the object name, while the remaining part of the pathnamekey is known as the prefix.

In simple words, key = prefix + object name