AWS S3 basics - Getting started

What is AWS - S3 

S3 is storage solution from Amazon (Secured storage service) where you can store documents such as images, videos, machine images and other documents - With S3 - you pay for the storage and the bandwidth. S3 is very reliable and 99.99% available. 

With S3, you might want to store static content of a web site or data generated out of a project in a storage service so that it is available globally. S3 is often used with other AWS products such as EC2. 

Its very easy to use. Following are different ways by which you can store and retrieve data. 

• Using Command line interface. 
• using AWS console. 
• Using AWS SDK. 

Characteristics: 

• Data is stored as objects and objects are stored as folders called buckets. 
• You may store as many objects as you want in a bucket. 
• You can read, upload and delete objects in your buckets. 
• You can control access to the bucket. 
• Supports versioning of data objects. 

Main features: 

• Cross region replication. 
• Event notifications (whenever an object is placed in S3) can be sent to SQS, lambda etc., 

How pricing works in S3: 

• With S3, you pay only for the storage you use. There is no min fee or setup cost. As of Apr 2015, you pay 3 cents per GB for the first 1TB / month.  
• You also pay for the PUT, POST, COPY and GET requests. 
• GET: $0.004 per 10,000 requests. 
• PUT, POST: $0.005 per 1000 requests. 
• No charges for delete requests.
• You also need to pay for data transfer pricing: 

The price keeps changing every now and then, visit this page to get the updated pricing: 

http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/

Get started: 

• Signup for AWS account. 
• Go to AWS console - S3 options.  
• Create folders or buckets. 
• Upload objects to buckets. 
• Assign permission to buckets. 
• Create events for buckets. 
• Programming with S3

AWS provides SDKs for Java, PHP, .net, Python, Node.JS, Ruby and AWS Mobile SDK. You can use these apis to create documents and retrieve documents.

Visit S3 home page for more information 

http://aws.amazon.com/s3/