S3: A Modern File Server

Amazon S3 stands for “Amazon Simple Storage Service” and is an object storage and a central piece of AWS cloud offering.

Compared to EBS and EFS, S3 offers even higher scalability. Similar to EFS, S3 can be considered serverless because we don’t need to manage anything regarding the storage of objects or performance.

AWS S3 operates in terms of buckets (which must have globally unique identifiers) and objects stored within these buckets. Objects can have prefixes, which behave similarly to folders on a file system and allow us to group objects in buckets.

Features of S3

• Deeply integrated into IAM for authentication and authorization
• Offers additional authentication and authorization through Access Control Lists (ACLs)
• Supports versioning for buckets
• Supports multiple encryption modes

Scalability

Even though we create S3 buckets per region, the contents are accessible globally from all regions.

Note: The maximum object size for S3 is 5 TB. A bucket can grow infinitely.

High availability and durability

S3 offers the same durability of 11 nines (99.999999999%) as EFS in its standard storage class.

Note: S3 is Multi-AZ by default for its Standard storage class. ...