Amazon Simple Storage Service
Developer Guide (API Version 2006-03-01)
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Working with Amazon S3 Objects

Amazon S3 is a simple key, value store designed to store as many objects as you want. You store these objects in one or more buckets. An object consists of the following:

  • Key—The name that you assign to an object. You use the object key to retrieve the object.

    For more information, see Object Key and Metadata

  • Version ID—Within a bucket, a key and version ID uniquely identify an object.

    The version ID is a string that Amazon S3 generates when you add an object to a bucket. For more information, see Object Versioning.

  • Value—The content that you are storing.

    An object value can be any sequence of bytes. Objects can range from zero to 5 TB in size. For more information, see Uploading Objects.

  • Metadata—A set of name-value pairs with which you can store information regarding the object.

    You can assign metadata, referred to as user-defined metadata, to your objects in Amazon S3. Amazon S3 also assigns system-metadata to these objects, which it uses for managing objects. For more information, see Object Key and Metadata.

  • Subresources—Amazon S3 uses the subresource mechanism to store object-specific additional information.

    Because subresources are subordinates to objects, they are always associated with some other entity such as an object or a bucket. For more information, see Object Subresources.

  • Access Control Information—You can controls access to the objects you store in Amazon S3.

    Amazon S3 supports both the resource-based access control, such as an Access Control List (ACL) and bucket policies, and user-based access control. For more information, see Access Control.