Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)

Introduction

Amazon S3 is an incredibly scalable, durable, and secure object service solution used by businesses worldwide to store and retrieve data. Whether you’re handling backups, websites, or big data, S3's flexibility makes it an ideal choice. Amazon S3 stores data as objects within buckets. Object is a file and any metadata that describes the file. Bucket is a container for objects. To store your data in Amazon S3, 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), the unique identifier for the object within the bucket.

Buckets vs Objects

Storage Classes

Amazon S3 offers a range of storage classes designed for different use cases. These classes are purpose-built to provide the lowest cost storage for different access patterns. These classes are ideal for virtually any use case, including those with demanding performance needs, data lakes, residency requirements, unknown or changing access patterns, or archival storage. The table below shows the various storage classes and their use cases.

Access Control

Amazon S3 is secure, and private by default, with extensive auditing capabilities to monitor access requests to resources. Access to S3 resources must be explicitly granted to an identity to ensure security.
This access can be granted by the below Access Management tools

• Bucket Policy: JSON-based policies attached to buckets to specify access permissions, enabling fine-grained control over who can access specific resources.

• Identity-Based Policy: Policies attached to AWS IAM identities (users, groups, roles) that define permissions to access S3 resources across the AWS account.

• S3 Access Grants: An access control tool that simplifies granting cross-account access to specific objects or buckets using access permissions.

• Access Points: Customized access control points with unique policies to simplify access for large data sets, especially in shared environments or multi-tenant architectures.

• Access Control List (ACL): Legacy method for managing access to buckets and objects by defining read and write permissions for users and groups.

• Object Ownership: A setting that controls ownership of objects uploaded to a bucket, often used to ensure the bucket owner automatically owns all objects, simplifying permissions management.

Data Protection

• Versioning: Versioning in Amazon S3 is a means of keeping multiple variants of an object in the same bucket. You can use the S3 Versioning feature to preserve, retrieve, and restore every version of every object stored in your buckets.
  Buckets can be in one of three states:

  • Unversioned (the default)
  • Versioning-enabled
  • Versioning-suspended

• Replication: You can use replication to enable automatic, asynchronous copying of objects across Amazon S3 buckets. Buckets that are configured for object replication can be owned by the same AWS account or by different accounts.

Security and Encryption

Encryption Options: All Amazon S3 buckets have encryption configured by default, and all new objects that are uploaded to an S3 bucket are automatically encrypted at rest.

• Server-side encryption - Amazon S3 managed keys (SSE-S3) is the default encryption configuration for every bucket in Amazon S3. To use a different type of encryption, you can either specify the type of server-side encryption to use in your S3 PUT requests, or you can set the default encryption configuration in the destination bucket. Other server-side encryption includes Server-Side Encryption with AWS Key Management Service and Server-Side Encryption with Customer-Provided Keys

• Client-side encryption – You encrypt your data client-side and upload the encrypted data to Amazon S3. In this case, you manage the encryption process, encryption keys, and related tools.

Conclusion

In summary, Amazon S3 provides a scalable, secure, and versatile storage solution for a range of needs. With robust access controls, encryption options, and seamless AWS integration, S3 empowers businesses to efficiently manage and protect their data, supporting innovation and growth in the cloud.

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References

• https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/data-protection.html

• https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/security.html

• https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/access-management.html

• https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/Versioning.html