CSC/ECE 517 Spring 2015/ch1a 7 SA

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

Background

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.

S3 is an example of an object storage and is not like a traditional hierarchical file systems. Data is stored as objects and a collection of objects is stored in a bucket. Every object must be contained within a Bucket. Within each bucket, any number of objects can be stored and each object is identified by a user defined key. Each object is identified by an unique key and composed of user data (up to 5 Terabytes) and metadata (up to 2 kilobytes). There is a limit of 100 buckets per account. S3 provides APIs to interact with buckets and objects [4]. Buckets can be configured to belong to a particular Region (US, EU, Asia Pacific etc.) and by default Amazon also does versioning for each object stored. Each object in S3 is identified by a bucket, an object ID and a version ID. [5].

Amazon S3 launched in March of 2006 in the United States [6] and in Europe in November of 2007 [7]. Since its inception, Amazon S3 has reported tremendous growth, now up to two trillion objects and on average 1.1 million requests every second! [8].