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AWS Cert: Regions and s3 basics

These are my simplified study notes of key topics on AWS S3

Regions and Availability Zones

AWS Regions are distinct, isolated geographic areas containing multiple independent Availability Zones (AZs), which are physically separate groups of data centers with dedicated power and networking.

Example Regions:

  • us-east-1 (US East - N. Virginia)
  • eu-west-1 (Europe - Ireland)

Example AZs:

  • us-east-1a
  • us-east-1b
  • us-east-1c

What is AWS S3

S3 means simple storage service. It can store miscellaneous types of files in a pay-as-you-go manner with uptime close to 99.99999999999%. This can be translated to an easy to use and very reliable storage system.

Overall structure

The S3 service is structure in Buckets. These buckets can take files and folders, and must have a unique name. The unique name will further get converted in a url.

Why my bucket will get an URL?

Because S3 also offers a static file service. Through the bucket policies, you can allow your bucket and files to be accessible by anyone in the internet. That basically means that if you host an html file, it will get served just as any static website would.

Tiering and pricing

You can choose to host your files into different storage tiers. They will vary by warmth (frequency of access) and by retrieval time. The prices also vary between tiers, with colder storage being the cheapest option.

You also pay to transfer files between tiers and regions — and that can cost a lot!

Security and versioning

With S3 you can add versioning which means you can store older version of you files. It's basically a backup every time you alter something in a file. You can also add other life cycle management rules like deletion after a certain downtime (no access). On top of that you can reduce latency by enabling file replication across regions.

Encryption is enable by default and you can:

  • Let aws do the job with the keys
  • Manage the key by yourself in AWS or bring your own

Other interesting stuff

  • AWS had a service called Storage Gateway that you can put up in you local server rack and utilize it part of your NAS or SAN
  • AWS has the Snow devices (Snowball and Snowmobile) that you can use to move petabytes of data in a secure, encrypted, and physical way to the AWS servers