With Amazon S3, you can upload any amount of data and access it anywhere in order to deploy applications faster and reach more end users. Organizations around the world use Amazon S3 to store application data and other forms of cloud content. Amazon S3 provides a reliable and scalable platform that provides a suite of storage options to meet specific customer needs. Let’s take a look at some compelling Amazon S3 use cases.
Backup File System
Amazon S3 enables storing & retrieving large amounts of data such as application data and static files. Many AWS users deploy S3 buckets for backup and restore operations, including a variety of AWS backups with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), and AWS Storage Gateway. It also serves as storage for many third-party backup solutions.
Archival Storage
Amazon S3 Glacier storage enables data archiving, providing high performance, flexibility, and low costs. S3 Glacier offers unlimited scalability and 99.999999999% (11 nines) data durability. Simply stated, it allows archiving older media, regulatory and compliance archives, or long-term backups while still making it easily accessible when it’s needed.
Static Web & Application Hosting
You can use Amazon S3 to host static websites. A growing number of websites are static — they don’t run any server-side code, only using HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Using the static website hosting feature, an S3 bucket can host static websites for a few dollars a month and easily scale up to high demand. In addition, S3 can be combined with Amazon CloudFront, a content delivery network (CDN) service built for high performance and security. It may be also be cheaper to host on S3 rather than an EC2 instance.
Compliance/PII
Data security and compliance are critical ongoing tasks. Organizations using S3 have tools to meet applicable compliance & security policies such as PCI and HIPAA. For example, bucket policies and access control lists can limit access to sensitive data. For ongoing protection, Amazon Macie uses machine learning and pattern matching to discover and help protect sensitive data. And AWS CloudTrail enables automated real-time monitoring of logs for changes to S3 policies.
Media Hosting & File Sharing
One way to improve the scalability of websites is serving content from multiple web servers. You may serve HTML and script files from EC2 and separately serve images, video and audio files from S3. Amazon S3 offers scalability to meet changing demand. You pay only for storage and traffic — as data and traffic grow you pay more, or if they contract, you pay less. You can also use S3 for file sharing, making collaboration a breeze. You can use AWS’s managed SFTP service,
you can mount the bucket to a file system and access the files using SFTP, or you can use an application that natively supports S3 protocol.
Private Local Repository
Amazon S3 can be configured as a private remote code repository. You can find a number of ways that organizations have used S3 in DevOps pipelines. For example, some have used S3 with git.
Analytics
Hundreds of thousands of data lakes run on AWS to maximize critical data insights. Using S3 as a data lake foundation enables using AWS analytics services like data ingestion, storage, analytics, and machine learning (ML). Amazon S3 provides a solid foundation for data lakes with virtually unlimited scalability and high durability. You can easily grow from gigabytes to petabytes of content, paying as you go.
S3 Event Triggers
An interesting option for S3 is being able to create a Lambda function and configure an S3 trigger that can be invoked every time you create, remove, or update an object to your Amazon S3 bucket. Lambda lets you run asynchronous custom code without provisioning or managing servers, so you can create all kinds of responses. For example, uploading a file could trigger a media transformation process to convert media files to other formats (e.g., MP4 to MOV, WEBM, and AVI). You also may want to pre-process data before it is stored in a database. AWS Lambda supports major programming languages like Go, Java, Ruby, and Python.
Amazon S3 Use Cases
Amazon S3 is known for its reliability and scalability as it meets customer needs around the globe. It’s been a building block for organizations around the world for almost 20 years, and it continues to evolve to meet new requirements. As cloud adoption has grown, Amazon S3 use cases have grown along with it, and we expect that to remain the trend for years to come.
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