I’ve been documenting my learning journey with Amazon Web Services—and this time, it’s S3.
Here are a few things that finally clicked for me:
ARCHITECT’S LOG | Episode 09: The Infinite Storage
"If AWS is a city, S3 is the warehouse that never runs out of space."
Before we dive into networking, we have to master Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service). It’s the backbone of the cloud whether you're hosting a static website, storing logs, or building a massive data lake.
Here is why S3 is foundational to any architecture:
Buckets & Objects: The Basics
Think of S3 as a global file system:
Buckets: Your root containers. Remember: bucket names must be globally unique across all of AWS!
Objects: Your files. Each object can be up to 5TB, and you can store an unlimited number of them. This can be either as a file name or a folder path + file name. Example: file.txt, folder/file.txt.
Durability vs. Availability ️
AWS designed S3 for "11 nines" of durability (99.999999999%). This means your data is effectively "safe for life." Availability is then managed by choosing the right class to balance speed and cost.
The 6 Storage Classes (The Architect’s Toolkit)
An architect’s job is to optimize cost by matching the data to the right tier:
S3 Standard: Best for "Hot Data" accessed frequently with millisecond latency.
S3 Express One Zone: High-performance, single-zone storage for AI/ML workloads requiring single-digit millisecond latency.
S3 Standard-IA: Infrequent Access; lower cost for data accessed monthly.
S3 Intelligent-Tiering: The "set it and forget it" tier that automatically moves data to cheaper classes based on access patterns.
S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval: High-performance archiving for data needed in milliseconds but accessed rarely (e.g., medical records).
S3 Glacier Deep Archive: The ultimate low-cost option for long-term compliance data that can take 12–48 hours to retrieve.
- Security: Locked Down
By default, all new buckets are private. We use Bucket Policies for resource-level access and IAM Policies for user-level permissions to ensure only the right identities touch our data.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/opeyemi-ogunsanya_aws-cloudarchitecture-s3-share-7453292163850829824-nMEC
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