Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)
Industry-leading cloud object storage offering 11 Nines durability, S3 Intelligent-Tiering, and seamless data lake integration.
Industry-leading cloud object storage offering 11 Nines durability, S3 Intelligent-Tiering, and seamless data lake integration.
Coming from Google Cloud?
Both are industry-standard flat object stores providing 11 Nines durability with global bucket namespaces.
- Flat object stores where forward slashes represent logical key prefixes.
- Tiered lifecycle policies to transition aging data to colder storage classes.
- Server-side encryption with customer-managed keys (CMEK / KMS).
- Automated Tiering: AWS has S3 Intelligent-Tiering with zero retrieval fees; GCP relies on Autoclass.
- Security Layers: AWS evaluates both IAM Policies and S3 Bucket Resource Policies; GCP uses unified Cloud IAM with Uniform Bucket-Level Access.
- Deep Archive Cost: S3 Glacier Deep Archive ($0.00099/GB/mo) is lower cost than GCS Archive ($0.0012/GB/mo).
What is Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)?
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service offering industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance. S3 provides 99.999999999% (11 Nines) data durability, stores data redundantly across multiple Availability Zones, and features automated cost optimization via S3 Intelligent-Tiering.
Decision Guide: When to Choose This Service
Use Amazon S3 as the primary data lake storage layer for all analytical workloads, EMR, Athena queries, Redshift Spectrum, and long-term compliance archives.
Do NOT use S3 for transactional low-latency random file updates (use Amazon EFS or EBS instead) or relational ACID OLTP transactions.
Core Architectural Pillars
Globally unique root containers storing objects with logical prefix paths.
Replicated across at least 3 geographically separated Availability Zones.
Automatically moves data between frequent, infrequent, and archive tiers with $0 retrieval fees.
Centralizes object permissions by disabling legacy S3 ACLs in favor of IAM and Bucket Policies.