Amazon Glacier

To sign up for Amazon S3, visit the S3 console. You must have an Amazon Web Services account to access this service. If you do not already have an account, you will be prompted to create one when you begin the Amazon S3 sign-up process. After signing up, refer to the Amazon S3 documentation, view the S3 getting started materials, and see the additional resources in the resource center to begin using Amazon S3.

You can store virtually any kind of data in any format in Amazon S3. The total volume of data and number of objects you can store are unlimited. Individual Amazon S3 objects can range in size from a minimum of 0 bytes to a maximum of 50 TB.

Amazon S3 offers general purpose buckets, directory buckets, table buckets, and vector buckets. General purpose buckets are recommended for most use cases and can store objects across all storage classes except S3 Express One Zone. Directory buckets are for low-latency use cases with S3 Express One Zone. Table buckets are optimized for analytics and machine learning workloads using Apache Iceberg. Vector buckets are designed for storing and querying vectors.

Amazon S3 is designed for high reliability. The S3 Standard storage class is designed for 99.99% availability, while other storage classes have varying availability percentages. All storage classes are backed by the Amazon S3 Service Level Agreement, which provides service credits if the monthly uptime percentage falls below the committed level.

Yes, Amazon S3 delivers strong read-after-write consistency automatically. After a successful write of a new object or an overwrite of an existing object, any subsequent read request immediately receives the latest version of the object. This consistency model also applies to list operations, ensuring immediate reflection of changes.

Amazon S3 is designed to handle traffic for any internet application. Its pay-as-you-go pricing and unlimited capacity ensure that incremental costs don’t change and service is not interrupted. The massive scale of Amazon S3 helps spread the load evenly, so individual applications are not affected by traffic spikes.

General purpose buckets are the original S3 bucket type and can store objects across all storage classes except S3 Express One Zone. They are recommended for most use cases. Directory buckets, on the other hand, only allow objects stored in the S3 Express One Zone storage class, which provides faster data processing within a single Availability Zone. They are recommended for low-latency use cases.

Amazon stores your data and tracks its associated usage for billing purposes. Amazon will not otherwise access your data for any purpose outside of the Amazon S3 offering, except when required to do so by law. You can also control access to your data using existing access control mechanisms in Amazon S3, including bucket and IAM policies.