Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is the object storage service of Amazon Web Services. Data is stored as objects, each identified by a key, inside containers called buckets, and is read and written through an HTTP API rather than a file system.
Why it matters
S3 is used for backups, user uploads, logs, data lakes and static website assets. It scales without capacity planning and is designed for very high durability. Many other AWS services read from or write to it, and many third-party tools speak the S3 API, so it has become a common storage interface.
Access is controlled by IAM policies, bucket policies and optional public access settings. Most well-known S3 data leaks came from buckets that were made public by mistake.
Example
aws s3 cp logo.png s3://example-assets/img/logo.png
aws s3 ls s3://example-assets/img/
The object key is img/logo.png. The slash is only part of the name; S3 has no real folders, although consoles display prefixes like folders.
Common mistakes
- Making a bucket public to fix a permissions error instead of correcting the policy.
- Treating S3 like a file system and expecting atomic renames or file locking.
- Serving a busy site straight from S3 without a CDN, which raises latency and data transfer costs.
- Forgetting lifecycle rules, so old versions and logs pile up and keep billing.
Related
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