AWS S3

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) provides scalable object storage with industry-leading durability (99.999999999%). S3 is fundamental to AWS, used for data lakes, backups, static websites, and as storage for many other AWS services.

Table of Contents

• Core Concepts
• Common Patterns
• CLI Reference
• Best Practices
• Troubleshooting
• References

Core Concepts

Buckets

Containers for objects. Bucket names are globally unique across all AWS accounts.

Objects

Files stored in S3, consisting of data, metadata, and a unique key (path). Maximum size: 5 TB.

Storage Classes

Class	Use Case	Durability	Availability
Standard	Frequently accessed	99.999999999%	99.99%
Intelligent-Tiering	Unknown access patterns	99.999999999%	99.9%
Standard-IA	Infrequent access	99.999999999%	99.9%
Glacier Instant	Archive with instant retrieval	99.999999999%	99.9%
Glacier Flexible	Archive (minutes to hours)	99.999999999%	99.99%
Glacier Deep Archive	Long-term archive	99.999999999%	99.99%

Versioning

Keeps multiple versions of an object. Essential for data protection and recovery.

Common Patterns

Create a Bucket with Best Practices

AWS CLI:

# Create bucket (us-east-1 doesn't need LocationConstraint)
aws s3api create-bucket \
  --bucket my-secure-bucket-12345 \
  --region us-west-2 \
  --create-bucket-configuration LocationConstraint=us-west-2

# Enable versioning
aws s3api put-bucket-versioning \
  --bucket my-secure-bucket-12345 \
  --versioning-configuration Status=Enabled

# Block public access
aws s3api put-public-access-block \
  --bucket my-secure-bucket-12345 \
  --public-access-block-configuration \
    BlockPublicAcls=true,IgnorePublicAcls=true,BlockPublicPolicy=true,RestrictPublicBuckets=true