Amazon S3

S3 stands for Simple Storage Service and is one of Amazons Web Services (AWS) It is highly scalable and an inexpensive way to store and retrieve data. This data can be held privately or made accessible to other parties Developers can access the data through a simple web interface. Amazon S3 was carefully engineered to meet the requirements for scalability, reliability, speed, low-cost, and simplicity. S3 has now been running for 4 years.

Developers can write, read and delete objects of 1 byte to 5 gigabytes of data each. These objects are stored in a "bucket" and can be accessed by a unique key. Each bucket can be stored within different Regions eg, US, EU depending on the requirements of the developer. There is the option to move objects from region to region. Factors that may affect which region to use may include closeness to data centres and/or customers, remoteness for disaster recovery and the cost of different regions.

As S3 is highly scalable, developers only pay for what they use making it a very cost effective way to store data. As the application develops so can the storage needed without any access or availability problems. Due to the huge scale of Amazons S3, spikes in traffic do not affect services as the level of performance was designed for 99.99% availability.

Home users may also find a cost benefit in using the service to back up their data.