Day 4: Deep Dive into Amazon S3 – Object Storage in the Cloud

Today was all about Amazon S3, one of the most widely used AWS services. I’ve heard of S3 often, but I finally took the time to really understand how it works — from storage classes to lifecycle rules, and even static website hosting. Here’s what I learned:

---

What is S3?

Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is object storage built to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere. It’s widely used for hosting websites, backups, media storage, and more.

---

Key Concepts I Covered

✅ Buckets & Objects

Buckets are containers for data, and everything we upload is an “object” — including the file and its metadata.

✅ Versioning

S3 can keep multiple versions of the same object. It’s useful when you need rollback capabilities or protection against accidental deletes.

✅ Server Access Logging

You can enable logging to track who accessed your data. Good for audits and debugging access issues.

✅ Multipart Upload

For large files, S3 allows uploading in parts. If a network drop happens midway, you don’t lose the whole upload.

✅ Object Lock

Object Lock helps in compliance and ransomware protection by enforcing WORM (Write Once, Read Many) settings.

✅ Data Encryption

You can encrypt data in transit (HTTPS) and at rest using AWS-managed or your own encryption keys (SSE-S3, SSE-KMS).

---

Hosting & Replication

✅ Static Website Hosting

S3 lets you host static websites — just HTML, CSS, JS. You can even configure error/index pages.

✅ Durability & Availability

S3 offers 99.999999999% durability and 99.99% availability — it’s built to never lose your data.

✅ Storage Classes

I explored:

• Standard – default, frequent access

• Intelligent-Tiering – automatic cost optimization

• Standard-IA / One Zone-IA – infrequent access

• Glacier & Deep Archive – long-term cold storage

✅ Lifecycle Rules

You can automate when objects move to cheaper storage or get deleted based on age or access patterns.

---

Replication

✅ Cross-Region & Same-Region Replication

Great for backup and compliance. Data automatically replicates to another bucket either within the same region or to another region.

---

Intro to CloudFront

CloudFront is AWS’s Content Delivery Network (CDN). It works great with S3 to serve static content faster globally.

---

LAB Work Done:

• Created an S3 bucket

• Uploaded files with metadata

• Enabled versioning and logging

• Configured a static website

• Applied lifecycle policy

• Integrated with CloudFront for global content delivery

• Tried uploading a large file via multipart upload