AWS Solutions Architect Associate Exam Prep – Simple Storage Service (S3)

Chapter 1 – AWS Overview
Chapter 2 – IAM
Chapter 3 – S3
Chapter 4 – S3 Versioning
Chapter 5 – S3 Cross Region Replication
Chapter 6 – S3 Life-Cycle Management
Chapter 7 – Amazon CloudFront 
Chapter 8 – Amazon Storage Gateway

Introduction

Chapter 3 of this blog post series will be all about Amazon’s object-based storage service, S3 (Simple Storage Service). This topic is critical to passing the AWS Solutions Architect Associate exam.

Simple Storage Service (S3)

Provides developers and IT Teams with secure, durable, highly-scalable object storage. Amazon S3 is easy to use, with a simple web services interface to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere on the web.S3 is a safe place to store your files.

• S3 is Object based storage.
• The data is spread across multiple device and facilities.
• Designed to with stand failure, built for resiliency.
• Files can be from 0 bytes to 5 TB
• Files are stored in buckets (buckets are like folders).
• S3 is a universal namespace, that is, names bust be unique globally.
  • https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/acloudguru
• Default 100 S3 buckets per account

Videos, Photos, PDF – Flat Files – Object-Based Storage. Would not run a database from or run a VM off of – need block storage for this.

When you upload a file to S3 you will receive a HTTP 200 response if the upload was successful.

• Data Consistency Model for S3
• Read after Write consistency for PUTS of new Objects
• Eventual Consistency for overwrite PUTS and DELETES (can take some time to propagate)
• Updates to S3 are atomic, you’ll either get the old version or the new version
• Writes are able to be immediately read, when updating it may take some time to propagate, so

Simple Key, Value Store

• Objects consist of the following:
• Key (the name of the object)
• Value (the data and is made up of a sequence of bytes)
• Version ID (important for versioning)
• Metadata (data about the data your storing)
• SubResources
• Access Control Lists (ACL – Who can access this object? Fine grained permissions)
• Torrent (S3 does support the bittorrent protocol)
• Built for 99.99% availability for the S3 platform
• Amazon guarantee 99.9% availability
• 11 x 9’s durability guarantee
• Tiered storage available
• Lifecycle management
• Versioning
• Encryption
• Secure your data using Access Control Lists and Bucket Policies

Tiers / Classes:

• S3 (Standard) – 99.99% availability 11 x 9’s durability, stored redundantly across multiple devices in multiple facilities and is designed to sustain the loss of 2 facilities concurrently
• S3 – IA (infrequently Accessed) For data that is accessed less frequently, but requires rapid access when needed.
  • Lower fee than S3, but you’re charged a retrieval fee.
  • Store it, access immediately, but charged.
• Reduced Redundancy Storage (RRS) – Designed to provide 99.99% durability and 99.99% availability of objects over a given year.
• Glacier – 3 to 5 hours to restore from Glacier – very cheap, but used for archival only.
  Retrieval time is significantly less.

• Glacier is its own independent service, own landing page in the console.
• Extremely low-cost .01$ per GB

 

Charges:

• Storage
• Requests
• Storage Management Pricing
  • Tag the data for HR, Developers to track your costs against S3
• Data Transfer Pricing?
  • Data into S3 is FREE
  • Replication from one region to another is a FEE
• Transfer acceleration
  • Enables fast, easy and secure transfers of files over long distances betwen our end users and an S3 bucket. Transfer acceleration takes advantage of Amazon Cloud Front globally distributed Edge Locations. As the data arrives at an Edge Location, the data is then routed to S3 over an optimized network path.

Exam Tips:

• Files ONLY, no operating systems
• 0bytes to 5TB
• Unlimited storage and unlimited scale
• Bucket(s) = Folder(s)
• Universal Namespace, must be 100% globally unique
• Read after Write Consistency on Puts of New Objects
• Eventual Consistency for overwrite Puts and Deletes
• S3 Standard = Durable, Immediately Available, Frequently Accessed
• S3 – IA = Durable, Immediately Available but Infrequently Accessed
• S3 – RRS = Data that can be easily reproduced
• Glacier = Archived data where you can wait 3-5 hours before accessing
• IMMUTABLE!
• Key / Name = Lexographical
• Value (data)
• VersionID
• Metadata
• Subresources
• ACL’s
• Torrent Protocol
• 200 Response = SUCCESS 🙂
• READ THE S3 FAQ BEFORE TAKING THE EXAM!