| « PreviousNext » | |
   | Did this page help you? Yes | No | Tell us about it... |
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)
Amazon S3 is a repository for Internet data. Amazon S3 provides access to reliable, fast, and inexpensive data storage infrastructure. It is designed to make web-scale computing easy by enabling you to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from within Amazon EC2 or anywhere on the web. Amazon S3 stores data objects redundantly on multiple devices across multiple facilities and allows concurrent read or write access to these data objects by many separate clients or application threads. You can use the redundant data stored in Amazon S3 to recover quickly and reliably from instance or application failures.
Objects are the fundamental entities stored in Amazon S3. Objects consist of object data and metadata. The metadata is a set of name-value pairs that describes the object. The data portion is opaque to Amazon S3.
Every object stored in Amazon S3 is contained in a bucket. Buckets organize the Amazon S3 namespace at the highest level and identify the account responsible for that storage. Amazon S3 buckets are similar to Internet domain names. Objects stored in the buckets have a unique key value and are retrieved using a HTTP URL address. For example, if an object with a key value /photos/mygarden.jpg is stored in the myawsbucket bucket, then it is addressable using the URL http://myawsbucket.s3.amazonaws.com/photos/mygarden.jpg.
Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2
The combination of Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2 provides resizable computing capacity with highly scalable and fast data storage infrastructure.
Amazon EC2 uses Amazon S3 for storing Amazon Machine Images (AMIs). You use AMIs for launching EC2 instances. In case of instance failure, you can use the stored AMI to immediately launch another instance, thereby allowing for fast recovery and business continuity.
Amazon EC2 also uses Amazon S3 to store snapshots (backup copies) of the data volumes. You can use snapshots for recovering data quickly and reliably in case of application or system failures. You can also use snapshots as a baseline to create multiple new data volumes, expand the size of an existing data volume, or move data volumes across multiple Availability Zones, thereby making your data usage highly scalable. For more information about using data volumes and snapshots, see Amazon Elastic Block Store.
Amazon S3 stores AMIs and snapshots redundantly on multiple devices across multiple facilities, thus providing an instance with highly durable storage infrastructure.
Amazon EC2 doesn't have a built-in capability to work with Amazon S3. If you have permission, you can access a bucket using its URL. If you are a developer, you can use the API to access data in Amazon S3. You can also use the AWS Tools for Windows PowerShell to access Amazon S3 objects. Otherwise, there are a variety of tools that other people have written that you can use to access your data in Amazon S3; some of the common ones are discussed in the AWS forums. For more information about using Amazon S3, see the Amazon Simple Storage Service Developer Guide.
