Amazon S3
Object storage built to retrieve any amount of data from anywhere
What is Amazon S3?
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service that provides industry-leading scalability, durability, availability, and security for any amount of data.
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Benefits
What problems does Amazon S3 solve?
Durability and availability
S3 is designed for 99.999999999% (11 nines) durability and 99.99% availability by default, backed by the strongest SLAs in the cloud. You store data. S3 protects any amount of data for virtually any use case.
Storage cost complexity
S3 eliminates the need to predict storage requirements or overprovision capacity. S3 delivers multiple storage classes with the best price performance for any workload and automated data lifecycle management, so you can store massive amounts of frequently, infrequently, or rarely accessed data in a cost-efficient way. You pay only for what you store and access, with no minimum commitments or upfront costs.
Security and compliance
Compliance certifications span HIPAA, PCI-DSS, FedRAMP, and SOC. Security is the default posture, not an add-on. S3 encrypts all objects by default, blocks public access at the account level, and supports granular access controls through IAM policies, bucket policies, and access points.
Use cases
What are the top Amazon S3 use cases?
Data lakes and analytics
S3 serves as the foundation for cloud data lakes, storing structured and unstructured data at any scale for analytics with Athena, Redshift Spectrum, EMR, and third-party tools.
AI/ML training data
S3 stores training datasets accessed by SageMaker, Bedrock, and custom Machine Learning (ML) pipelines, with Express One Zone delivering the low-latency throughput required for GPU-intensive workloads.
Backup and disaster recovery
S3 provides durable, cost-effective storage for backups with cross-region replication, versioning, and lifecycle policies that automate transitions to archival tiers.
How it works
How does Amazon S3 work?
You create a bucket, upload objects, and set permissions. S3 stores your data as objects within buckets, each identified by a unique key. Objects can be any file type from 0 bytes to 50 TB in size.
You never manage storage infrastructure. S3 handles durability, availability, encryption, scaling, and capacity. Your responsibility is your data and access policies.
Pricing
How much does Amazon S3 cost?
Try S3 for free
New AWS customers receive up to $200 in AWS Free Tier credits, which can be applied towards eligible AWS services, including Amazon S3.
Learn more about S3 on the Free Tier
Pay only for what you use
You pay for storage per GB-month, requests, and data retrieval. There are no minimum fees and no upfront commitments. S3 Standard starts at $0.023 per GB-month for the first 50 TB, with volume discounts at higher tiers. S3 Glacier Deep Archive offers archival storage at $0.00099 per GB-month.
Customers using Amazon S3
Get started with Amazon S3
Amazon S3 documentation
Step-by-step guides for creating buckets, managing objects, configuring access, and setting up lifecycle policies.
Build your S3 skills
Build your S3 skills with hands-on tutorials and self-paced courses on AWS Skill Builder.
Start building with Amazon S3
Retrieve any amount of data from anywhere with Amazon S3.
Get started with S3Frequently asked questions
Create an AWS account, open the S3 console, and create your first bucket. New AWS customers receive up to $200 in AWS Free Tier credits, which can be applied towards eligible AWS services, including Amazon S3.
Amazon S3 is ideal for any organization that needs to store, protect, and retrieve data at any scale, from startups storing application assets to enterprises running petabyte-scale data lakes and AI/ML pipelines.
Amazon S3 encrypts all objects at rest by default using SSE-S3, blocks public access at the account level, replicates data across multiple facilities for 11 nines of durability, supports versioning to protect against accidental deletion, and offers Object Lock for WORM compliance. Access is controlled through IAM policies, bucket policies, access points, and VPC endpoints.
Amazon S3 is object storage accessed via HTTP APIs, designed for any amount of unstructured data with virtually unlimited scale. EBS provides block storage volumes attached to EC2 instances for databases and applications requiring file-system-level access. EFS provides managed file storage with POSIX semantics for shared access across multiple instances. S3 is the most durable, scalable, and cost-effective option for data that does not require block or file-level access.
See a list of all FAQs here.
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