CSC/ECE 517 Spring 2015/ch1a 7 SA

https://docs.google.com/a/ncsu.edu/document/d/1TgBtp7flIPKJwkkShgtcIkt--mtHuwVHsQX6Tpzj1rc/edit

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is a remote, scalable, secure, and cost efficient storage space service provided by Amazon. Users are able to access their storage on Amazon S3 from the web via REST [1] HTTP [2], or SOAP [3] making their data accessible from virtually anywhere in the world.

Amazon S3 launched in March of 2006 in the United States [4] and in Europe in November of 2007 [5]. Since its inception, Amazon S3 has reported tremendous growth, now up to two trillion objects and on average 1.1 million requests every second! [6].

Background

Design

S3 is an example of an object storage unlike a traditional hierarchical file system. S3 exposes a simple feature set to improve robustness. [7]

Objects

Objects are the basic units of storage in Amazon S3. Each object is composed of object data and metadata. S3 supports a size of up to 5 Terabytes per object. Each object has a metadata part that is used to identify the object. Metadata is a set of name-value pairs that describe the object like date modified. Custom data about the object can be stored in metadata by the user. Every object is identified by a user defined key and is versioned by default.

Buckets

A bucket is a container for objects and every object must be part of a bucket. Buckets Buckets can be configured to be hosted in a particular region (US, EU, Asia Pacific etc.) in order to optimize latency. S3 limits the number of buckets per account to 100.