Working with AWS S3 Bucket

This article provides an introduction to AWS Storage services and gives guidelines to get started with the AWS S3 bucket.

I think you already know that Amazon Web Services (AWS)and Google are the leading cloud service providers in the world right now. Speaking about Amazon they got some exciting cloud services for us. AWS S3 (Simple Storage Service) is one of them. If you need an easy and quick storage service AWS S3 is the best solution. Before talking about Amazon S3, let’s see what we are going to discuss today,

1. What are the AWS storage services?
2. What is AWS S3?
3. How AWS S3 work?

So, those are the main topics we are going to cover in today's article. Let’s take a look at each of them.

What are the AWS storage services?

There are two basic types of storage services in the AWS cloud,

1. Block type of storage.
2. Object type of storage.

AWS Elastic Block Storage (EBS) is an example of a block type of storage. Basically, when you deploying an EC2 instance EBS instance will automatically attach to the EC2 instance, this EBS is consists of boot volume and data volume. Today we are talking about AWS S3 bucket storage which is a type of object storage.

What is AWS S3?

AWS S3 is a highly scalable object storage service. It provides industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance to your services. Amazon S3 provides easy-to-use management features so you can organize your data and configure access controls to meet your specific business, organizational, and compliance requirements. And also AWS S3 is a very cost-effective storage service, you just have to pay for what you have used. Amazon Partner Network (APN) provides S3 storage with high availability all across the globe. So we can identify some major features in AWS S3,

1. cost-effective storage solution.
2. Easily manage data and access controls.
3. High scalability and availability.

How AWS S3 work?

Within the S3 service, users create ‘Buckets’, these are called S3 buckets. Buckets are used to store object-based files and can be thought of as folders. When Buckets are created users specify which region the Bucket should be deployed in. Considerations here are usually cost, expected latency, and any security or governance related policies.

Each object uploaded to an S3 bucket is independent in terms of its properties and associated permissions. When individual or groups of files are uploaded to buckets, users specify the type of S3 storage to be used for those specific objects.

With Lifecycle Management S3 users can design lifecycle policies, automatically moving objects from one storage tier to another after a set number of days. These policies can be defined based on when the object was first created or when it was most recently accessed.

Let’s take a look at a practical example to create and use an AWS S3 bucket

As a pre-requirement go to the AWS mange console and create an account there, then you can use the AWS S3 service.

Step 1 -: Go to the S3 listed under storage in the AWS mange console. Click on create bucket.

This will lead you to the bucket configuration page,

Step 2 -: for the basic configuration just provide a bucket name that you need to create.

After providing the bucket name, click on the create bucket button. It will create your bucket with the basic configuration.

Step 3 -: Upload a file to your S3 bucket by clicking the upload button in the bucket console.

Once you upload your file, select the file from the console and it will lead you to the object overview. from there you can the object URL that you are going to use to access your file.

You can use this URL address to access the file you uploaded to the S3 bucket, but by default, public access to the file is not provided because of that you will not able to access the file, You can provide public access from the permission tab in the file overview page.

Step 4 -: provide public access to the file you uploaded in the last step. first, enable the public access policy by unticking the option.

Now you will be able to add the public access to your file uploaded to the S3 bucket.

Now you are all set, try the object URL provided in the S3 bucket console, you should be able to access your file.

I have uploaded this file to my S3 bucket in the previous step, now I was able to access it, Now you can use this URL to share your file and use it anywhere.

So that showed how easy to use the AWS S3 as a storage unit, try more samples and let me know is there any issues, Cheers to everyone…!