S3s

S3, or Amazon Simple Storage Service, is a scalable object storage service provided by Amazon Web Services. The plural form S3s is sometimes used informally to refer to multiple S3 deployments across regions, though the product is officially singular. S3 is designed to store and retrieve unlimited data over the internet through a simple API.

Data in S3 is stored as objects within named buckets. Each object consists of a key, data payload, and metadata. Objects are addressed by bucket name and key, and S3 is designed to scale to trillions of objects with virtually unlimited storage. The service offers high durability and availability across multiple facilities.

Storage classes allow balance of cost and access time: Standard, Intelligent-Tiering, Standard-IA, One Zone-IA, Glacier, and Glacier Deep Archive. Lifecycle policies can automatically transition objects between classes and expire data. Features such as cross-region replication, versioning, and MFA-delete provide data governance and protection.

Security and access control include server-side encryption options (SSE-S3, SSE-KMS, and client-side encryption), in-transit encryption via TLS, and granular access controls through IAM policies, bucket policies, and ACLs. AWS also provides S3 Block Public Access to prevent unintended public exposure.

Other capabilities include S3 Select for querying a subset of data within an object, event notifications to Lambda, SQS, or SNS, and S3 Transfer Acceleration to speed transfers over long distances. S3 also supports data governance features such as Object Lock for retention and regulatory compliance, and Outposts for on-premises storage.

Typical use cases include backups, data lakes, static website and media hosting, and disaster recovery. Pricing is based on storage used per GB-month, plus requests, data transfer, and any features such as encryption or lifecycle transitions.