What is Amazon S3?

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service offering industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance. Millions of customers of all sizes and industries store, manage, analyze, and protect any amount of data for virtually any use case, such as data lakes, cloud-native applications, and mobile apps. With cost-effective storage classes and easy-to-use management features, you can optimize costs, organize and analyze data, and configure fine-tuned access controls to meet specific business and compliance requirements.

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. S3 delivers the resiliency, flexibility, latency, and throughput, to ensure storage never limits performance.

S3's free tier offers a 12 month free trial that provides 5GB of Amazon S3 storage in the S3 Standard storage class; 20,000 GET Requests; 2,000 PUT, COPY, POST, or LIST Requests; and 100 GB of Data Transfer Out each month. To learn more about S3's free tier offering and cost effective pricing options, visit the Amazon S3 pricing page .

Build a data lake

A data lake is a centralized repository that allows you to store all your structured and unstructured data at any scale. You can run data analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and high-performance computing (HPC) applications to unlock the value of your data.

With an Amazon S3 data lake, users in Salesforce’s organization can discover, access, and analyze all their data, regardless of where it lives, in a secure and governed way.

Read the Salesforce case study

Backup and restore critical data

Meet your recovery time objective (RTO), recovery point objective (RPO), and compliance requirements with S3's robust replication functionality, data protection with AWS Backup, and various AWS Partner Network solutions.

Ancestry uses the Amazon S3 Glacier storage classes to restore terabytes of images in mere hours instead of days.

Learn about the Amazon S3 Glacier and S3 Glacier Deep Archive storage classes

Archive data at the lowest cost

Move data archives to the Amazon S3 Glacier storage classes to lower costs, eliminate operational complexities, and gain new insights.

The BBC, a UK public service broadcaster, safely migrated its 100-year-old flagship archive to Amazon S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval.

View the BBC case study

Put your data to work

Because Amazon S3 stores more than 350 trillion objects (exabytes of data) for virtually any use case and averages over 100 million requests per second, it may be the starting point of your generative AI journey.

Grendene is creating a generative AI-based virtual assistant for their sales team using a data lake built on Amazon S3.

Read the Grendene case study

Industry-leading scalability

“Modernizing the NASCAR technology stack by using AWS Storage is an incredibly monumental step in our overall cloud adoption journey at NASCAR. Migrating all our video, audio, and image libraries to the industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance of Amazon S3 allows us to spend more time developing additional workflows that help our business.” —Chris Wolford, Senior Director of Media and Event Technology, NASCAR Read the NASCAR blog Read the NASCAR blog

Cost savings

“You think about our 400 percent growth, and that translates into user growth and data growth. Amazon S3 is a massively scalable storage service that we use to serve our growing number of customers worldwide. By optimizing our Amazon S3 usage, we can stretch our IT budgets and extend the impact of our technology.” — Manoj Kalyanaraman, Chief Technology Officer, Dropsuite Read the Dropsuite case study Read the Dropsuite case study

Amazon S3 stores data as objects within buckets. An object is a file and any metadata that describes the file. A bucket is a container for objects. To store your data in Amazon S3, you first create a bucket and specify a bucket name and AWS Region. Then, you upload your data to that bucket as objects in Amazon S3. Each object has a key (or key name), which is the unique identifier for the object within the bucket.

S3 provides features that you can configure to support your specific use case. For example, you can use S3 Versioning to keep multiple versions of an object in the same bucket, which allows you to restore objects that are accidentally deleted or overwritten. Buckets and the objects in them are private and can only be accessed with explicitly granted access permissions. You can use bucket policies, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies, S3 Access Points, and access control lists (ACLs) to manage access.

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