Amazon S3 Reviews

The primary use case of this solution is for the storage of large amounts of data.

It's a public cloud deployment model that anyone can deploy.

There is no need to upgrade as they don't have versions, it's a managed service, it's hybrid. There are changes that we make internally. It's Amazon S3.

The most valuable features are the high availability, high performance, IAM access control, and server-side encryption.

Some of the areas that could be improved are the dashboard, and to have a richer functionality.

Because there are so many services offered by Amazon, they can do anything. If we were to add anything it wouldn't be anything inside of it, but services on top of it. 

There is a concern with security. In one of our main use cases, we prescreen, but we have to create a gateway or layer on top of it to access the data in that particular case. Because the user accesses the data, they to be authenticated before doing so. 

It indicates that the users of our systems need to gain access to this data. Amazon allows access with this mechanism called Presigned URL. 

We need to share files, so we upload the file and request a link from Amazon, which allows you to share with anyone. The link is signed, which is the reason it is called Presigned. However, this sign is not compliant with internet regulations.

In our company, we are concerned with privacy regulations. In the United States, there is a law and regulation that is called HIPPA. It's a regulation on how to keep patients' data private and how to protect it. Amazon S3 is eligible for HIPPA compliance, but not with the Presigned URL.

This is very important and because we cannot use the Presigned URL, we have to build the layer on top of Amazon S3. As a result of having to do this, we lose performance, availability, and we lose some benefits of Amazon S3.

A feature that should be included is to find and provide a HIPPA compliant solution for the Presigned URL.

This a stable solution. We are not aware of any technical issues.

We are a large company and everyone uses this solution. Approximately one hundred users in different areas made up of developers and administrators.

While we have a small technical team, there is almost no maintenance with this solution. It's fully managed.

This solution is scalable.

Technical support is very good. 

They are very professional and they respond quickly. If they don't have a solution, they will contact they development team in Amazon and provide you with a detailed response with a solution to resolve the issue. 

They are very thorough and I really appreciated it. They helped me.

I am more than satisfied with the support and would recommend using the support.

We have not used any previous cloud-based solutions.

The initial setup is straightforward.

The download is very easy and can be used in seconds.

I performed the implementation of this solution.

This solution has reasonable pricing and a low cost.

We didn't evaluate other options. Amazon accounts are straightforward. 

There is always a choice on whether or not you will use the cloud. If you make the choice to use the cloud then you can choose if you are just using Google or Microsoft. When you already have an account with Amazon, your choice is Amazon S3.

There are other solutions, but for us the choice to use Amazon S3 was clear.

It's difficult to offer advice as it depends on the use case and what this solution is intended for.

This solution is managed fully, and there is no need for upgrades or anything. It's cloud-based. If you just Gmail, you don't upgrade Gmail.

I would recommend this solution for companies of any size. It's good for starting up because you only pay for what you use. It's internet-capable, making it good for any company.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

PART I

For those not familiar, Simple Storage Services (S3), Glacier and Elastic Block Storage (EBS) are part of the AWS cloud storage portfolio of services. There are several other storage and data related service for little data database (SQL and NoSql based) other offerings include compute, data management, application and networking for different needs shown in the following image.

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AWS Services Console via www.amazon.com

Simple Storage Service (S3) is commonly used in the context of cloud storage and object storage accessed via its S3 API. S3 can be used externally from outside AWS as well as within or via other AWS services. There are various S3 modes including standard, Reduced Redundancy (RR) and Infrequent Access (IA). For example with Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) including via the Amazon Storage Gateway. Glacier is the AWS cold or deep storage service for inactive data and is a companion to S3.

S3 is well suited for both big and little data repositories of objects ranging from backup to archive to active video images and much more. In fact if you are using some of the different AaaS or SaaS services including backup or file and video sharing, those may be using S3 as its back-end storage repository. For example NetFlix leverages various AWS capabilities as part of its data and applications infrastructure.

AWS basics

AWS consists of multiple regions that contain multiple availability zones where data and applications are supported from.

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Note that objects stored in a region never leave that region, such as data stored in the EU west never leave Ireland, or data in the US East never leaves Virginia.

AWS does support the ability for user controlled movement of data between regions for business continuance (BC), high availability (HA), and disaster recovery (DR). Read more here at the AWS Security and Compliance site.

PART II

For those not familiar, Simple Storage Services (S3), Glacier and Elastic Block Storage (EBS) are part of the AWS cloud storage portfolio of services. With S3, you specify a region where a bucket is created that will contain objects that can be written, read, listed and deleted. You can create multiple buckets in a region with unlimited number of objects ranging from 1 byte to 5 Tb in size per bucket. Each object has a unique, user or developer assigned access key. In addition to indicating which AWS region, S3 buckets and objects are provisioned using different levels of availability, durability, SLA’s and costs (view S3 SLA’s here).

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Cost will vary depending on the AWS region being used, along if Standard or Reduced Redundancy Storage (RSS) selected. Standard S3 storage is designed with 99.999999999% durability (how many copies exists) and 99.99% availability (how often can it be accessed) on an annual basis capable of two data centers becoming un-available.

As its name implies, for a lower fee and level of durability, S3 RRS has an annual durability of 99.999% and availability of 99.99% capable of a single data center loss. In the following figure durability is how many copies of data exist spread across different servers and storage systems in various data centers and availability zones.

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What would you put in RRS vs. Standard S3 storage'

Items that need some level of persistence that can be refreshed, recreated or restored from some other place or pool of storage such as thumbnails or static content or read caches. Other items would be those that you could tolerant some downtime while waiting for data to be restored, recovered or rebuilt from elsewhere in exchange for a lower cost.

Different AWS regions can be chosen for regulatory compliance requirements, performance, SLA’s, cost and redundancy with authentication mechanisms including encryption (SSL and HTTPS) to make sure data is kept secure. Various rights and access can be assigned to objects including making them public or private. In addition to logical data protection (security, identity and access management (IAM), encryption, access control) policies also apply to determine level of durability and availability or accessibility of buckets and objects. Other attributes of buckets and objects include life-cycle management polices and logging of activity to the items. Also part of the objects are meta data containing information about the data being stored shown in a generic example below.

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Access to objects is via standard REST and SOAP interfaces with an Application Programming Interface (API). For example default access is via HTTP along with a Bit Torrent interface with optional support via various gateways, appliances and software tools.

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Example cloud and object storage access

The above figure via Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press) shows a generic example applicable to AWS services including S3 being accessed in different ways. For example I access my S3 buckets and objects via Jungle Disk (one of the tools I use for data protection) that can also access my Rackspace Cloudfiles data. In the following figure there are examples of some of my S3 buckets and objects used by different applications and tools that I have in various AWS regions.

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AWS S3 buckets and objects in different regions

Note that I sometimes use other AWS regions outside the US for testing purposes, for compliance purpose my production, business or personal data is only in the US regions.

The following figure is a generic example of how cloud and object storage are accessed using different tools, hardware, software and API’s along with gateways. AWS is an example of what is shown in the following figure as a Cloud Service and S3, EBS or Glacier as cloud storage. Common example API commands are also shown which will vary by different vendors, products or solution definitions or implementations. While Amazon S3 API which is REST HTTP based has become an industry de facto standard, there are other API’s including CDMI (Cloud Data Management Interface) developed by SNIA which has gained ISO accreditation.

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Cloud and object storage access example via Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking

In addition to using Jungle Disk which manages my AWS keys and objects that it creates, I can also access my S3 objects via the AWS management console and web tools, also via third-party tools including Cyberduck.

PART III

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Cloud and object storage access example via Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking

AWS cloud storage gateway

In 2012 AWS released their Storage Gateway that you can use and try for free here using either an EC2 Amazon Machine Instance (AMI), or deployed locally on a hypervisor such as VMware vSphere/ESXi. In general, the gateway is an AWS alternative to using third product gateway, appliances of software tools for accessing AWS storage.

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Image courtesy of www.amazon.com

When deployed locally on a VM, the storage gateway communicates using the AWS API’s back to the S3 and EBS (depending on how configured) storage services. Locally, the storage gateway presents an iSCSI block access method for Windows or other servers to use.

There are two modes with one being Gateway-Stored and the other Gateway-Cached. Gateway-Stored uses your primary storage mapped to the storage gateway as primary storage and asynchronous (time delayed) snapshots (user defined) to S3 via EBS volumes. This is a handy way to have local storage for low latency access, yet use AWS for HA, BC and DR, along with a means for doing migration into or out of AWS. Gateway-cache mode places primary storage in AWS S3 with a local cached copy to reduce network overhead.

When I tried the gateway a month or so ago, using both modes, I was not able to view any of my data using standard S3 tools. For example if I looked in my S3 buckets the objects do not appear, something that AWS said had to do with where and how those buckets and objects are managed. Otoh, I was able to see EBS snapshots for the gateway-stored mode including using that as a means of moving data between local and AWS EC2 instances. Note that regardless of the AWS storage gateway mode, some local cache storage is needed, and likewise some EBS volumes will be needed depending on what mode is used.

When I used the gateway, a Windows Server mounted the iSCSI volume presented by the storage gateway and in turn served that to other systems as a shared folder. Thus while having block such as iSCSI is nice, a NAS (NFS or CIFS) presentation and access mode would also be useful. However more on the storage gateway in a future post. Also note that beyond the free trial period (you may have to pay for storage being used) for using the gateway, there are also fees for S3 and EBS storage volumes use.

How much do these AWS services cost'

Fees vary depending on which region is selected, amount of space capacity, level or durability and availability, performance along with type of service. S3 pricing can be found here including a free trial tier along with optional fees. 

Note that there is a myth that cloud vendors have hidden fees which may be the case for some, however so far I have not seen that to be the case with AWS. However, as a consumer, designer or architect, doing your homework and looking at the above links among others you can be ready and understand the various fees and options. Hence like procuring traditional hardware, software or services, do your due diligence and be an informed shopper.

Some more service cost notes include:

Note that with S3 Standard and RRS objects, there is not a charge for deletion of objects. 

As with Standard volumes, volume storage for Provisioned IOPS volumes is charged by the amount you provision in GB per month. With Provisioned IOPS volumes, you are also charged by the amount you provision in IOPS pro-rated as a percentage of days you have it in use for the month.

Thus important for cloud storage planning to know not only your space requirements, also IOP’s, bandwidth, and level of availability as well as durability. so for Standard volumes, you will likely see a lower number of I/O requests on your bill than is seen by your application unless you sync all of your I/Os to disk. Thus pay attention to what your needs are in terms of availability (accessibility), durability (resiliency or survivability), space capacity, and performance.

Leverage AWS CloudWatch tools and API’s to monitoring that matter for timely insight and situational awareness into how EBS, EC2, S3, Glacier, Storage Gateway and other services are being used (or costing you). Also visit the AWS service health status dashboard to gain insight into how things are running to help gain confidence with cloud services and solutions.

When it comes to Cloud, Virtualization, Data and Storage Networking along with AWS among other services, tools and technologies including object storage, we are just scratching the surface here.

Hopefully this helps to fill in some gaps giving more information addressing questions, along with generating new ones to prepare for your journey with clouds. After all, don’t be scared of clouds. Be prepared, do your homework, identify your concerns and then address those to gain cloud confidence.

We use this solution for cloud-based data storage.

We appreciate that this solution is relatively easy to use, straightforward, and reliable.

We would like some improvement in the cost of storage via this solution, as it currently has a very high price point.

We have been working with this solution for more than eight years.

We have found this to be a very stable solution during our time using it.

This is a very easily scalable solution.

The technical support for this solution are good, and have okay response times whenever we raise issues with them.

Positive

We previously used other data storage software. However, because this solution is straightforward to use, and our workload is in Amazon, it was more efficient to switch to this solution than using other tools. 

The setup of this solution is very simple, but just like any other software, there is a learning curve for those who are not yet familiar with the tool.

We implemented this solution using our in-house team.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

One of our clients required certain files to be processed and stored. As another separate service, they wanted a separate integration to capture those files or pull those files. As a storage location, we used S3. It was cloud storage between two services. It was an integration between two services.

Security-wise, it's very good. The scalability and availability are great.

The installation is easy.

It's a stable solution. 

The multi-zone replication is great.

Technical support is helpful. 

We would like Amazon to reduce the price of storage. 

I've been using the solution for eight months. 

The solution is very stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It is reliable and the performance is good. 

The solution can scale very well. 

Almost all of our clients use S3 for different requirements, however, I have gotten involved for about eight months with one client.

Overall Amazon support has been very helpful. When we have queries, when we have challenges, they were responsive. I'm a happy customer of Amazon support.

We found the initial setup to be very straightforward. There is not any cumbersome configuration. It's very, very straightforward and easy to implement.

The deployment took a few hours. That includes handling the security configuration.

You only need one or two people for deployment and maintenance. 

As an implementor, I can help a client with the setup.

Amazon should work to revamp its pricing structure so that pricing comes down. 

I'm an implementor. 

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten due to its scalability and availability. It also allows multi-zone replications. I would recommend this to customers - especially those that are geographically diverse. Companies like this should consider S3 as shared storage or for integrations required for file transfers and between multiple zones.

We primarily use the solution in order to share static files among web applications and mobile applications.

The ability to have everything in the cloud is the most valuable aspect of the solution. 

It allows me to only pay for what I use. Therefore, the pricing model is very useful.

The initial setup is straightforward.

The solution has been stable so far.

We've found the scalability to be good.

I don't really have any pain points with this product. There isn't really anything to complain about. It does what we need it to do.

Technical support could have a faster response time. They are a bit slow right now.

I've been using the solution for three or four years or so at this point. It's been a while.

The solution is fairly stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable and its performance is good.

The scalability is good. If a company can expand it, it can do so with ease.

Mostly, we implement this solution for small businesses.

At this point, neither we nor our clients have any plans to increase the usage.

Technical support is okay. They aren't good or bad. They are somewhere in the middle. Our main issue is the fact that they take too long to answer questions. Sometimes you need to wait up to two days to get any kind of response from them. They need to provide answers in a more timely manner.

The initial setup is not difficult or overly complex. It's very straightforward and easy to implement. A company shouldn't have any issues with the process.

The deployment times vary according to the company and its requirements. It could take anywhere from days to weeks.

You only need one person to handle the implementation process. It doesn't take a big team or a lot of people.

We are an implementor and can implement the solution for clients if they need us to.

The pricing is very fair. It's actually pretty inexpensive. We only pay for what we use. We don't have to pay for anything else.

We did not evaluate another product before ultimately choosing this solution. We went immediately to Amazon.

We are implementors.

I would recommend the solution to other companies. it's a very flexible product. It's cheap. You pay for what you get. It's just a cloud. AWS has a really good cloud implementation. I could not compare it with any other -such as Azure or Google - as I have not tried any of those. Users who would like to look at other options should check out Gartner's Magic Quadrant. However, any company can go easily to AWS straight away and be sure that they're going to pay a good price for a good service.

I'd rate the solution at a ten out of ten.

I work as an integrator of Amazon S3

Normal file system storage is very limited when you want to store additional objects. The concept of S3 is to give you the option to have sharing from multiple users. They can share content among various users in a file system. It has the capacity to scale and to accommodate more files than a normal file system. This solution can really scale according to demand and you pay according to your consumption.

Whatever enhancement they could include in terms of object storage and limitations, would be an improvement. There is a five terabyte limitation size, and in today's world with the data size doubling all the time, anything extra would be helpful. We really need a very, very huge file system, a big data system to accommodate all this content. 

It is a scalable solution, the product has content encryption and nobody can access it. Amazon has very good security when it comes to securing the S3 buckets. You can keep the content secure and the user can have the encryption key and even Amazon doesn't have access to it. It's very secure. 

The initial setup is straightforward. If you want to use it as a target for backup, you redirect the backup software to store data to it by using an API to talk to the S3 buckets. Depending on the application you want to deploy, integration is also easy. Amazon provides good documentation and if you have an IT background and go through the documentation, you can integrate.

Other companies are trying to reach them but they've been ahead of the game for a long time. As an object storage product and in comparison to what's available on the market, I rate this solution a 10 out of 10. 

The primary use case of this solution is for storage.

The most valuable features are unlimited storage, scalability, and performance.

The security model can be improved as it is a bit confusing.

The access speed could be faster.

I have been familiar with Amazon S3 for six years now.

I am always using the latest version because it is self-service, and you cannot choose the version you are using.

It's a stable solution.

It's a scalable solution.

I provide consulting services for this product and every customer we have is using it. Our clients are enterprise businesses.

I have used Amazon support for this product and I find the service to be good. We also try to provide for our clients.

The initial setup is easy, it's straightforward, and it only takes a few minutes to deploy.

I have experience with many cloud services and with several services through Amazon.

I would recommend this solution.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We haven't released the Amazon S3 platform in a production environment. It's more for prototyping and POC so far.

Normally we use it for the data dump. It's something similar to a data lake wherein we use it to obtain the data. 

The most valuable feature is the storage.

I would like to see translations or description context for the options. 

It is difficult for me as a consultant to explain the science, or the configuration processes, or why I am using this much power or the size to the customer. It takes some effort to describe how you got to that sizing.

We have some problems with connectivity. In my country, most of the issues we have are with stable connections rather than stable platforms.

In the next release, I think that it would be good to have wizards that would update into specific applications, for example, a one-touch configuration in Pagemaker. It would mean that you don't need to activate S3, and then have to do a configuration on the page. You would want a single wizard that would do all of the necessary applications.

Normally I work with on-premise solutions, then I started using Amazon S3 just over a year ago.

This solution is stable and I haven't had any issues with it slowing down.

There are many options, but there will be a learning curve to appropriately size one for a specific use case.

We have teams divided into application, web design, web technology, and cloud applications.

I haven't been in a situation where I have needed to contact technical support.

The initial setup is straightforward.

Sharing with other things that I have been doing, I was able to deploy this solution in one afternoon.

Azure is another solution that we were thinking of applying.

We have heard of Google Apps, but we haven't tried that solution.

You have to know specifically what it is being used for. 

One of the issues we face is that it is a developer's environment. 

In our country, the Philippines, people are often forced upon with brands such as Microsoft, Zadara, and even Oracle. 

Azure is something that is explored by developers. The onus is with the formal organization to get the people back in. 

I would rate this solution a fair eight out of ten. It does what I need it to do, but it is a developer's tool. It's not something that I have heard many people harp about.