Features of Amazon S3
The following are the main features of Amazon S3:
- Allows website hosting: Amazon S3 allows users to host a website and map it to their domain. This is very cost effective, because the user pays only for what he/she uses. Moreover, the user doesn't require highly configured servers to serve the website.
- Scalable: Amazon S3 doesn't restrict the user to any size limit for storing data. As it is a pay-as-you-go service, it stores the data, and the bill is generated accordingly. So the subscriber never faces a lack of space.
- Reliable: Amazon S3 guarantees a server uptime of 99.9 percent. Therefore, the subscriber does not need to worry about data reliability.
- Security: Amazon S3 provides a strong authentication mechanism where the stored data can be manipulated.
- Standard interfaces: Amazon S3 provides the Representational State Transfer (REST) and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) web services that can be consumed by any web framework.
- Reduced Redundancy Storage: Amazon S3 provides the subscribers with an optional feature for storing data with the Reduced Redundancy Storage (RRS) storage class. It is basically used for storing non-critical and reproducible data at lower levels of redundancy. The cost of storing on an RRS storage class is quite less as compared to the standard storage class.
- Torrent tracking and seeding: Amazon S3 can act as a torrent tracker, and seed the files from your machine.
- Share the data with a temporary URL: Amazon S3 provides the subscriber the ability to share a URL, which auto-expires after a period of time. This helps the subscriber in sharing the data for a minimal period of time. Other users cannot use that data after the URL expires.
- Logging: It provides the logging of all activities that are performed on bucket. This makes it easy for the subscriber to audit the activities on the bucket if he so wishes. Generally, when a subscriber hosts a website on Amazon S3, he enables the logging feature to track the activities.
- Versioning: Amazon S3 allows storing of multiple versions of an object. It is basically used for recovering old data that is lost unintentionally.
- Security: Amazon S3 provides security on buckets and objects. While creating the buckets, you can provide access control lists for other users of the bucket who can create, update, delete, or list objects. You can even set the geographical location of your data.
- Integration: Amazon S3 can be integrated with several other services such as Amazon EC2, Amazon EBS, Amazon Glacier, and many other applications. Generally, developers use Amazon S3 for storing images, videos, or documents, and for accessing them via HTTP Get.
