What is S3 Storage?

Amazon S3 storage stands for Simple Storage Service. It is an object-based storage service that offers industries leading repositories for scalability, data availability, performance, and security. It means enterprises and customers of all sizes can use it to store and protect the massive amount of data for various use cases, such as websites, mobile-based applications, backup, and data lakes. It also helps restore the archive, enterprise applications, IoT-based services and devices, and big data analytics. 

Amazon S3 provides easy-to-use management features to organise your data and configure the finely-tuned access controls to meet your specific business, organisation, and compliance requirements. In addition, S3 storage is designed for 99.99999999 % durability, and it stores data of millions of applications for companies all over the world.

Different storage classes inside an S3 storage

1. It offers an extensive range of storage classes that are designed for a different use case. 
2. S3 standard is for general purpose storage for frequently accessed data. 
3. S3 intelligent-tiering is for data with changing access patterns S3 standard infrequent access and S3 one zone-infrequent access for the long-lived but less frequently access data. 
4. Amazon S3 glaciers and glaciers Deep Archive is used for longed term archived data and digital preservation. These S3 outposts storage classes are used to store your S3 data on the premises if an existing AWS region does not meet your data residency requirements. Amazon S3 offers capabilities for the management of your data throughout its lifecycle. Once the life cycle policy sets your data, it will automatically transfer the multiple storage class without changing your different applications.

These are the different S3 storage classes

• Amazon S3 Standard (S3 Standard)

• Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering (S3 Intelligent-Tiering)

• Amazon S3 Standard-Infrequent Access

• Amazon Zone-IA

• Amazon S3 Glacier

• Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive

• S3 Outposts storage classes

Amazon S3 Standard

S3 standard storage is also known as general-purpose storage. It offers high durability and performance-based object storage for frequently accessed data. The reason is, it delivers low latency and high throughput. S3 standard storage is appropriate for various used cases, including cloud applications, dynamic websites, content distribution, mobile-based or games-based applications, and big data analytics. It can also be configured at the object level, and a single bucket can contain: 

• Objects stored over an across S3 standard.
• S3 standard intelligent-tiering.
• Standard-AI.
• S3 One Zone-IA

You can also use S3 lifecycle policies to transition objects between storage classes without any application changes automatically. 

Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering

It is also known as intelligent-tiering. S3 intelligent tiering is the storage class that delivers automatic cost savings by moving objects between the four access tiers of the accessing patterns change. It is well designed to optimise costs by automatically moving data to the most cost-efficient access tier without operational overhead. 

It works by storing objects in four access tiers: two low latency access tiers optimised for frequent and infrequent accessing and two opt-in archive accessing tiers designed for rare accessing. 

Objects uploaded and transitioned to the S3 intelligent-tiering are automatically stored in the frequently accessed tiers.

It works to monitor access patterns and then move the objects that have been accessed in 3 consecutive days to the infrequent access tiers. Once it gets completed, S3 intelligent-tiering will be moving objects that have not been accessed for 90 days straight to the archive access tiers. After 180 consecutive days of no access to the deep archive access tier. Objects are accessed later; It also moves the things back to the frequent access tier. 

Suppose you are retrieving the stored data in the archive or deep archivers tiers before retrieving objects. In that case, you must first restore its copy for the information for the restoring objects.There are no retrieval fees while using S3 intelligent-tiering storage classes and no additional tiering fees when the objects are moved between access the tiering within S3 intelligent tiering of an ideal storage class of data sets.

Amazon S3 Standard-Infrequent Access

It is also known as the Infrequent Access storage. It is for the data accessed less frequently, but it requires rapid access when needed. S3 standard IA offers a highly durable, high throughput, and low latency of an S3 standard with lower per GB storage retrieval fees. This combination of the low cost and high performance make the S3 storage standard-IA ideal for the long-term storage, backups and data stored for disaster recovery files. It can be configured at the object level, and a single bucket will contain an object stored across S3 Standard storage, S3 intelligent-tiering, S3 standard-IA, and one zone-IA. It can also use lifecycle policies to automatically transition objects are between storage class without any applications of the changes. 

Amazon S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access

Amazon S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access is also known as the S3 one-zone IA. It is also for data that is accessed less frequently, but it requires rapid access when needed. Unlike other S3 storage classes to store data in a minimum of three Availability (A-Zs), S3 one zone-IA is ideal for the customers who want a lower-cost option for the infrequently accessed data. Still, it does not need the availability and resilience of S3 standards. It is an excellent choice to store secondary backup copies of the on-premises data or easily re-create data. It can use it for cost-efficient storage of storage data for data replicated from the other AWS regions using S3 cross-region replications.

It also offers high durability, high throughput, and low latency of S3 standard storage with a low per GB storage price and per GB retrieval fees. Its storage classes will be configured at an object level, and a single bucket can contain objects stored across S3 Standard, intelligent-tiering, standard- IA, S3 one zone-AI. It can use S3 lifecycle policies to automatically transition objects between the storage classes without any changes inside applications.

Amazon S3 Glacier

Amazon S3 Glacier storage is also known as archive storage. It is a secure, durable and also low-cost storage cost for data archiving. It can reliably store any amount of data at low prices yet are competitive with cheaper than on-premises solutions. S3 storage glaciers provide three retrieval options that range from a few minutes to an hour to keep down the costs. It can be uploaded directly to the S3 glacier storage or a few usages of S3 lifecycle policies to transfer data between any of the S3 storage classes for active data of all courses of S3.

Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive

It is also known as Glacier Deep Archive storage. It is also a low-cost storage class and supports long-term retention and digital preservation of the data that may be accessed once or twice a year. It is well designed for customers, particularly those in highly regulated industries such as the financial, healthcare and public services, which retains data sets for the 7-10 years or will longer meet regulated compliance requirements. In S3 Glaciers, a deep archive is used for backups and disaster recovery use cases. It is also a cost-effective and easy to manage alternative to magnetic tape systems. S3 Glaciers are ideal for the archives where data is regularly retrieved. All the stored objects in the S3 glaciers Deep archive are replicated and stored across at least three geographically dispersed availability zones. They are also protected by 99.999999999% of the durability, and it takes 12 hours to restore them.

S3 on Outposts

It is also known as the S3 outposts storage classes. It is an outpost that delivers objects storage on-premises Outposts environment. It uses API's and features available in AWS regions today, S3 outposts, making it easy to restore and retrieve data on your outposts and secure the data, control access, tag, and report on it. S3 on outposts provides a single amazon S3 storage class named S3 outposts, which uses the S3 API's designed to durable and redundantly store the data across multiple devices and servers on the outposts. It is also ideal for workloads with locals data residency of the requirements, and it is to satisfy demands performance need to keeping data close on-premises applications.