Amazon S3

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Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is an online storage web service offered by Amazon Web Services. Amazon S3 provides unlimited storage through a simple web services interface. Data can be easily stored and retrieved at any time, from anywhere on the web. Amazon charges in proportion to the amount of data stored and applies charges for sending and receiving data.

Amazon S3 uses the same scalable storage infrastructure that Amazon.com uses to run its own global e-commerce network.

Launched in March 2006[1], Amazon S3 is currently being used by small start-ups and enterprise clients as a web hosting service, image hosting service, back-up system, and more.

[edit] Design

S3's design aims to provide scalability, high availability, and low latency at commodity costs.

S3 stores arbitrary objects up to 5 gigabytes in size, each accompanied by up to 2 kilobytes of metadata. Objects are organized into buckets (each owned by an AWS account), and identified within each bucket by a unique, user-assigned key.

Buckets and objects can be created, listed, and retrieved using either a REST-style HTTP interface or a SOAP interface. Additionally, objects can be downloaded using the HTTP GET interface and the BitTorrent protocol.

Requests are authorized using an access control list associated with each bucket and object.

Bucket names and keys are chosen so that objects are addressable using HTTP URLs:

  • http://s3.amazonaws.com/bucket/key
  • http://bucket.s3.amazonaws.com/key
  • http://bucket/key (where bucket is a DNS CNAME record pointing to s3.amazonaws.com)

Because objects are accessible by unmodified HTTP clients, S3 can be used to replace significant existing web hosting infrastructure.

[edit] References

[edit] External links


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