Amazon S3
Amazon S3 or Amazon Simple Storage Service is a service offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that provides object storage through a web service interface. Amazon S3 uses the same scalable storage infrastructure that Amazon.com uses to run its e-commerce network. Amazon S3 can store any type of object, which allows uses like storage for Internet applications, backups, disaster recovery, data archives, data lakes for analytics, and hybrid cloud storage. AWS launched Amazon S3 in the United States on March 14, 2006, then in Europe in November 2007. Design. Amazon S3 manages data with an object storage  architecture which aims to provide scalability, high availability, and low latency with high durability and availability. The basic storage units of Amazon S3 are objects which are organized into buckets. Each object is identified by a unique, user-assigned key. Buckets can be managed using the console provided by Amazon S3, programmatically the AWS SDK, or the REST application programming interface. Objects can be up to five terabytes in size. Requests are authorized using an access control list associated with each object bucket and support versioning which is disabled by default. Since buckets are typically the size of an entire  file system mount in other systems, this access control scheme is very coarse-grained. In other words, unique access controls cannot be associated with individual files. Amazon S3 can be used to replace static web-hosting infrastructure with HTTP client-accessible objects. The Amazon AWS authentication mechanism allows the creation of authenticated URLs, valid for a specified amount of time. Every item in a bucket can also be served as a BitTorrent feed. The Amazon S3 store can act as a seed host for a torrent and any BitTorrent client can retrieve the file. This can drastically reduce the  bandwidth cost for the download of popular objects. A bucket can be configured to save HTTP log information to a sibling bucket; this can be used in data mining operations. There are various User Mode File System (FUSE)–based file systems for Unix-like operating systems (for example, Linux) that can be used to mount an S3 bucket as a file system. The semantics of the Amazon S3 file system are not that of a POSIX file system, so the file system may not behave entirely as expected. Amazon S3 provides the option to host static HTML websites with index document  support and error document support. Amazon S3 storage classes. Amazon S3 offers four different storage classes that offer different levels of durability, availability, and performance requirements. S3 API and competing services. The broad adoption of Amazon S3 and related tooling has given rise to competing services based on the S3 API. These services use the standard programming interface but are differentiated by their underlying technologies and business models. A standard interface enables better competition from rival providers and allows economies of scale in implementation, among other benefits. History. Amazon Web Services introduced Amazon S3 in 2006. Amazon reported it stored  more than 100 trillion objects , up from 10 billion objects in October 2007, 14 billion objects in January 2008, 29 billion objects in October 2008, 52 billion objects in March 2009, 64 billion objects in August 2009, 102 billion objects in March 2010, and 2 trillion objects in April 2013. In November 2017 AWS added default encryption capabilities at bucket level.