An introduction to S3 storage

The Simple Storage Service (usually named S3) is a storage service provided by Amazon in its Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud offering. S3 was one of the first services provided by AWS. It was made publicly available in March 2006, and presented as the Amazon in-house storage solution accessible to everybody. S3 is not only very different from a relational database, but also different from a NoSQL database (which also grew in popularity at the same time). S3 is based on the very simple principle of storing a value with an associated key, and retrieving that value via this key. In its simplest definition, it is just a key/value store. There is no notion of searches, transactions, or joins in S3. It looks more like a filesystem than a database. However, it benefits from the usual cloud promises: scalability, availability, redundancy, and easy access...