Amazon S3 Reviews

My main use case for Amazon S3 is to store company data, and I have worked on it extensively. Currently, I am working on migrating our legacy data onto Amazon S3, and we have created AppX on top of DynamoDB and Amazon S3.

We use Amazon S3 for storing large volumes of structured and unstructured data, including raw, processed, and backup data for analytics and pipeline workflows. Since AppX is built on top of DynamoDB and Amazon S3, we initially thought this would be faster as a proprietary product, but we realized it runs a little slowly. My main job role is to migrate all our databases, all our business objects, and their relevant tables into Amazon S3.

The migration process involves using Amazon S3 because it is cost-efficient, and I work with ETL pipelines extensively, making it very suitable for hosting intermediate data. I am currently working on migration, but previously, it was very easy to integrate Amazon S3 with AWS Glue, Athena, and Spark for analytics, and it is excellent for maintaining versioned data.

The best features that Amazon S3 offers are high durability and availability with virtually unlimited storage, lifecycle management for automated tiering and cost control, versioning to retain and recover data changes, and integration with services such as Glue, Athena, EMR, Lambda, along with strong security via IAM roles, bucket policies, and encryption.

These features help by ensuring data is always available, securely stored, and easily accessible for pipelines. Lifecycle policies reduce manual cleanup, versioning safeguards against accidental deletions, and integrations allow us to directly run analytics or trigger workflows without moving data around.

Amazon S3 event notifications help automate tasks such as triggering ETL jobs or Lambda functions on new data arrivals, and features such as cross-region replication ensure data redundancy and compliance, while fine-grained access control makes it easy to manage permissions across teams securely.

My organization has seen improvements in data accessibility, reduced infrastructure costs, and simplified data management through Amazon S3. We now have a unified scalable storage layer that supports analytics, backups, and migrations seamlessly, leading to faster workflows and better decision-making.

Amazon S3 can be improved with more intuitive cost visualization tools with forecasting capabilities, faster restore times from Glacier tiers, better real-time monitoring of data access patterns, and perhaps simplified cross-account sharing and fine-grained access management at scale.

The main pain point that I have faced is the need for faster restore times from Glacier tiers, which could definitely be improved.

I have been working in my current field for three years, and I have been using Amazon S3 for the same amount of time, so I have over three years of experience with it.

Amazon S3 is stable except for the time approximately a week or two back when DynamoDB crashed for US-West-1 or US-East-1, which made our whole system go down. Otherwise, it offers 99.99% availability.

The scalability of Amazon S3 is excellent as it handles unlimited data and seamlessly supports growth without manual provisioning or performance degradation.

The customer support for Amazon S3 is very good; they are responsive and knowledgeable, providing quick resolutions, clear documentation, and proactive guidance during migrations or performance tuning.

Positive

Previously, we used on-premises storage and Azure Blob Storage for some workloads before fully transitioning to Amazon S3. The main reason for switching to Amazon S3 was for better scalability and integration with AWS analytics tools.

The setup for Amazon S3 was straightforward with minimal upfront cost, its pricing is fully pay-as-you-go which keeps it flexible, and licensing is not very complex as it mainly depends on storage class, data transfer, and API requests. Managing lifecycle policies helps control expenses.

I have seen a return on investment, and the ROI that we observed in our organization includes reducing manpower by 20% and achieving zero downtime for storage expansion, which improves overall productivity.

Since using Amazon S3, storage costs have reduced by around 35% to 40% through lifecycle tiering, data availability improved to 99.9% which minimizes downtime, ETL processing time decreased by approximately 25% to 30% due to faster data access, and backup retrieval time has been cut by 50% using Amazon S3 Glacier for archival.

We evaluated Azure Blob Storage and GCP's Google Cloud Storage, and we chose Amazon S3 for its superior ecosystem integration, proven durability, and extensive automation features.

My advice for others looking into using Amazon S3 is to start with clear bucket organization and tagging from day one and to use lifecycle rules to control costs.

I would appreciate if this interview could be more user-friendly, as the microphone gets cut off and my voice is not picked up clearly. There should be a way to type out responses as a backup in case the microphone is not working or my voice cannot be picked up properly.

I would appreciate a short poem or haiku that summarizes my review. I gave this review an overall rating of 9.

In one project, I have used Amazon S3 as a data lake with Lake Formation to guarantee the control access and the security and compliance of the data. The other two projects were only to store some files to be used by our web applications.

What I appreciate most about Amazon S3 is the tiering of the objects; with the tiering, we can determine if an object won't be accessed frequently and send it to cold storage or a Glacier storage unit, which greatly lowers AWS costs. The inventory feature, called S3 Inventory, is a cool feature as well. The object access point is another notable feature. Amazon S3 has many useful features; I can simply host my website, which has to be a static web page, but even so, it's beneficial to put my code inside of Amazon S3 as a static website that people worldwide can access.

I have worked with many petabytes of data stored in Amazon S3, and I have never had any performance issues, stability issues, or anything similar.

That is a hard question; I cannot think of any improvements right now because all the necessary features are already included in Amazon S3.

One aspect I would mention is the naming in Amazon S3. If I create an S3 bucket with a specific name, such as 'Roberto bucket,' I cannot create it in another account with the same name. I understand why this happens, but this naming restriction is something I don't particularly appreciate.

I have been using Amazon S3 for two years.

Amazon S3 is very stable. I have never encountered any problems with bugs or system breakdowns.

The customer support team from Amazon is excellent. I do not interact frequently with the support team, but during the times I have contacted them, they were very helpful.

Positive

I did not previously use a different solution.

The initial setup for Amazon S3 is easy. If you want to use it without extensive configuration, it is very straightforward.

It requires more experience if you want to delve deeper into the service, but for simple storage needs where security, compliance, and cost aren't primary concerns, it's quite straightforward.

I am a user.

Amazon S3 is not expensive. Amazon S3 has a reasonable price as you pay a flat price to use it.

It is acceptable to show my review on your website with my name, job, and company. I have already recommended Amazon S3 as it's a great service. On a scale of 1-10, I rate Amazon S3 a 10.

I use Amazon S3 mainly for backup purposes, specifically for the backup of the internal and user data of the end users or our customers.

I found it tricky to identify the features or capabilities of Amazon S3 that I have found most valuable and useful because I haven't had much time to go deep into it. I only provision Amazon S3, so I wouldn't be able to give any particular answer because I haven't used many features of Amazon S3 apart from the distributed and the disaster recovery feasibility. Disaster recovery feature of Amazon S3 is among the very few that I used.

Out of the features that I have used in Amazon S3, I liked the scalability and the disaster recovery planning the most.

Regarding the scalability of Amazon S3, the structure of how it is designed is to distribute data between three different regions. If one of the regions goes down, I have replicas over the two other regions. That is very handy because there is no latency to switching to the region itself, and there is no downtime of the region or my personal data itself.

The only downside is the scalability limitations. I don't know if that is from AWS or my subscription.

I have been working with Amazon S3 for three years.

I could definitely rate the stability and reliability level of Amazon S3 as nine because nothing is perfect; that is why nine.

I could only share my thoughts on Amazon S3's availability and durability stats based on what I have used; for me, it is very great and stable with solid reliability and scalability.

I would evaluate the scalability of Amazon S3 as eight because we have a strong hard-stop limit of how much we could scale. I don't know if that limit is related to my subscription or Amazon's.

We don't often communicate with the technical support of Amazon S3. There is a team who could actually interact with AWS support, but not me. I personally have never communicated with the technical support of Amazon S3.

Negative

Before Amazon S3, I did not use different technology for the same use cases. I usually used the internal storage area for NAS or SAN storages, specifically my storage boxes. When my team used the internal storage devices, Amazon S3 was the only platform I used for data encryption and disaster recovery.

I did not participate in the initial setup and deployment of Amazon S3. It was already set up by my predecessor, and I only manage that.

I did not participate in the decision-making process for choosing Amazon S3.

Personally, I haven't had any chance to evaluate other technologies or solutions before working with Amazon S3.

I provide services, so I am not a customer or an end-user of Amazon S3.

I haven't explored that many areas of Amazon S3 because I only use it for provisioning, so that is only the surface area, and I wouldn't be able to answer that.

The main reason I don't usually use the dashboard itself for GUI with Amazon S3 is that I typically use the command line interface, so I am not able to touch that area. Most of the things use the keyboard and typing the commands on the command line. There is flexibility on using the dashboard, and someone could give more reviews over the features or flexibility if they use the dashboard itself, but that is not the case with me.

The encryption options of Amazon S3 are by default enabled. If I want to disable that, I need to intervene explicitly. By default, it is enabled for my case; if it is otherwise for some other cases, I have no idea about that.

I find the encryption useful for my specific use cases in Amazon S3. If any platform has encryption in place, that means the data transfer is somewhat slow rather than sending the unencrypted data. That is a tradeoff. On any platform, that is the same case. But as I said earlier, I use Amazon S3 buckets for saving or storing information or files related to personal belongings of any customer, so that is very much needed.

I don't use Amazon S3's lifecycle management features.

I don't use versioning in Amazon S3 because I have a retention period of ninety days. After any file is older than ninety days, it gets deleted, so it is not useful for me.

For Amazon S3's storage classes, I use mostly block storage because it is fast and reliable. While delivering services, most of what I need aside from speed is reliability because if the platform is reliable, I could use it for more and more. So it is more or less quite reliable.

From Amazon, I have not used any official documentation for Amazon S3 because I follow my SOPs only. I haven't had any issues for which I had to follow Amazon's documentation itself.

I would rate this review a nine overall.

With regards to my experience with AWS solutions, it focuses on automation and the AI side, wherein we created different solutions that would help us improve customer experience.

My experience is a combination of different solutions, wherein we glue them together to form solutions that fit with our requirements such as AWS CodeBuild, CodeDeploy, CodeStar, and CodePipeline.

Amazon S3 is a cloud solution that can only be used locally if you have an Outpost, which allows for localized storage. If there's an AWS region in the Philippines, it can resolve data locality and residency issues, enabling customers to use Outposts and connect to a Philippine region, creating availability zones for deployment.

I have been working with Amazon S3 for our storage since 2015, which means I have approximately 10 years of experience with the solution.

The most effective features of Amazon S3 are its robust storage capabilities wherein you can combine it with different solutions, using it as a repository for analytics, whether for video analytics or data analytics, allowing for dynamic adjustment of storage automatically without any requisition or long process.

The initial setup of Amazon S3 is straightforward. Compared with all other storage solutions, Amazon S3 offers more flexibility in the setup and attributes it can provide, which can then be integrated with different applications.

Areas of improvement should focus more on the services of Outposts rather than the Amazon S3 portion. AWS should sell Outposts in the Philippines because currently, only a few companies are using it. AWS Outposts is a mini region that you can deploy on-premise, allowing direct use of different AWS services.

AWS should have a region in the Philippines; the nearest ones are Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Currently, Alibaba is the only hyperscaler with a region in the Philippines.

My suggestion would be for AWS to focus more on the Philippines region and market. This would solve data locality issues for banks, as in previous engagements with different banks, they sought to have their data in-country to resolve latency issues and process data locally without excessive costs associated with accessing data in different regions.

I have approximately 10 years of experience with Amazon S3, having started using it since 2015.

AWS solutions, including Amazon S3, are stable and can compete with different hyperscalers such as GCP, Azure, and Alibaba, all of which are trusted by customers.

Amazon S3 is a very scalable solution, though one setback is that a region should be established in the Philippines.

Some customers are requesting a Philippine region because if they deploy on AWS cloud, they can create disaster recovery setups. This is pertinent for banks to adhere to specific standards regarding physical data center proximity while maintaining a similar customer experience to having their own data center in the Philippines.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate technical support from Amazon as one of the best, since they have controls over the infrastructure that allow them to provide a higher SLA and availability. I would rate it nine out of ten for technical support.

Positive

I have been with the Telco side at SM, wherein we partnered with different hyperscalers or cloud providers to create solutions that would fit with customer requirements. That was my experience with the service provider portion. Currently, we are a direct consumer or user of AWS.

I have experience on both the service provider side and the customer side of AWS.

The initial setup of Amazon S3 is straightforward. Compared with all other storage solutions, Amazon S3 offers more flexibility in the setup and attributes it can provide, which can then be integrated with different applications.

The price of Amazon S3 depends on the region it's being served from. In the Asian region, there is different pricing based on the availability zone and workload. It can compete with different hyperscalers as GCP and Azure may offer lower pricing, but AWS provides a Pay As You Go model similar to Alibaba Cloud.

Azure targets more enterprise-level markets while AWS and Alibaba serve SMEs and mid-enterprises, which is what AWS focuses on currently.

I would rate Amazon S3 as nine out of ten overall. There's always room for improvement with the AWS solution.

I work with AWS Cloud since 2021. I have experience with AWS IAM for user management and love using EC2. I heavily use S3 and VPC. 

Additionally, I'm focused on cloud security products like security groups, policies, permissions, Security Hub, and Inspector.

S3 is a great service offering numerous possibilities. It allows for storing objects and files of various types. I appreciate its capability to create static websites and integrate with services like CloudFront, EC2, and DynamoDB. 

Despite being focused on security, I leverage features such as cryptography and integration with CloudTrail.

The practice of protecting data could be more streamlined or mandatory. Enhancements in security features might be beneficial.

I have been working with Amazon S3 since 2021.

I encountered some issues with the data lifecycle. Transitioning between S3 storage classes, like moving data from the standard class to Glacier or Glacier Deep Archive, has been challenging.

S3 offers good scalability and availability. Data placed in an S3 bucket is replicated across availability zones in a region, ensuring scalability and availability.

I hold two certifications in Azure but haven't used it recently. I also appreciated using Google Cloud Platform, but I'm not working with it yet.

Creating an S3 bucket is simple, though some concepts might seem hard initially. AWS provides detailed documentation and tutorials that help understand processes easily.

In my current company, I don't have much information as a new employee, and there is limited access. However, in a previous job, S3 was used for integrations with databases and serving static websites.

Understanding S3 storage classes is crucial for saving money. For example, moving infrequently accessed data to cheaper classes like Glacier is beneficial for long-term storage at a lower cost.

S3 offers multiple classes, allowing you to move data to cheaper classes for cost savings. AWS provides solutions to monitor your budget.

The recommendation is to study and understand S3 before using it due to its complexity. Learning and trying out different services within S3 is vital. 

I would rate it nine out of ten, as it is an excellent product, though not perfect.

Positive

The primary use case for Amazon S3 is as a storage service for structured and unstructured data. I use it for storing data for websites with different domains. My company and I use it internally for cloud-based services.

The most valuable features of Amazon S3 include scalability, durability, reliability, security, access control, cost-effectiveness, performance, speed, data management, analytics, static website hosting, seamless integration with other AWS services, and budgeting features. 

I find the cost-effective models particularly suitable for our needs. The performance with high-speed data retrieval and support for large file uploads is crucial. Security measures like encryption, access controls, and the block public access feature are also important. 

Another useful feature is the MFA delete function that prevents accidental and malicious data deletions.

There is a limitation with the data upload size, such as the five terabytes restriction. I would like to see an increase in the data upload limit, similar to DynamoDB, where there is no data limit.

I have been working with Amazon S3 for more than three years.

I rate the stability of Amazon S3 a ten out of ten. There is zero latency or downtime.

Scalability is rated ten out of ten. The level of scalability allows storage to automatically scale on demand, without the need for manual intervention.

The technical support for Amazon S3 is rated ten out of ten. I have not faced any recent issues, and their response is always prompt and satisfactory.

Positive

The initial setup of Amazon S3 is very easy and is rated ten out of ten. It usually takes only five to ten minutes to set up, depending on the specific requirements and amount of data.

I am responsible for service deployment, primarily using EC2 instances and Amazon RDS for databases.

I am still learning about AI services like SageMaker and Amazon Recognition to potentially test with S3 in the future. 

Overall, I rate Amazon S3 a ten out of ten.

We host applications on Amazon Web Services (AWS). We set up EC2 for running various applications and utilize S3 storage for data storage. For databases, we use MySQL and Microsoft API instead of AWS databases.

Amazon S3 is easily scalable and provides fantastic performance, especially in comparison to other cloud solutions like OCI and Azure. Its availability is high, almost at 99%, which is important for ensuring reliable access to stored data.

In terms of security, I struggled with setting permissions and access control initially.

I have been using AWS for five years.

Amazon S3 is highly stable. In my experience, it does not break down and there has been no downtime.

Amazon S3 is easily scalable and performs better compared to other cloud storage solutions.

The AWS support team is great. They have different levels of severity for support cases, and an engineer is assigned based on the severity of the issue.

Positive

I have used Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and Azure. S3 provides better scalability and performance compared to these solutions.

I have used OCI and Azure.

The initial setup of Amazon S3 is easy. It provides a user-friendly GUI, and setting up instances is straightforward. All you need is experience to perfect the setup process.

In-house engineers deploy solutions for customers and provide support to banks for AWS deployment.

Amazon S3 is user-friendly for beginners and easy to manage. I would rate Amazon S3 as nine out of ten.

I use Amazon S3 for storing objects, like files and documents. It is particularly valuable for personal projects where some of the files are stored there.

Your data is secured, and you don't have issues with running out of storage. It provides a positive impact on operations.

One of the benefits is being a global service, so it can be accessed from anywhere. From a features perspective, the ability to catalog data is beneficial. 

It automatically moves data that is not frequently accessed to a less expensive archive over a set period, which is amazing. Its stability and scalability are also impressive, as it allows for increased storage space according to demand. I've never had any stability issues with S3.

Sometimes it's difficult to set it up, such as when naming your bucket. The naming conventions require unique global names, which can be cumbersome. An improvement could be associating the naming with personal accounts, allowing more familiar or desired names without conflicting with global conventions.

It's getting to about three years now.

Amazon S3 is very stable, and I have never had any performance issues.

Amazon S3 is scalable, allowing increased or decreased storage space as needed.

I've not interacted with AWS technical support, however, I have aided my colleagues in navigating specific setups and processes in S3.

Positive

The initial setup for Amazon S3 was easy and straightforward for me. When launching an S3 bucket and uploading files, there wasn't any significant challenge. 

However, setting up a static website using an S3 bucket requires familiarity with the environment.

I've not really supported anyone apart from aiding colleagues in setup issues.

I am aware Amazon S3 has different pricing models based on your needs. I've used the free tier and haven't been charged yet.

Before using Amazon S3, understand what you aim to store or achieve. It is particularly suited for hosting static websites. Your data will be secure, and you can access it whenever needed without worry.

My primary use case for Amazon S3 includes using it for backups and deploying a website on an S3 bucket. Additionally, for my organization, it is used to deploy websites and leverage its architecture for deploying applications.

Amazon S3 has been beneficial because it is cost-effective and simplifies my data management through its life cycle policy, which automatically manages data I no longer need.

The most valuable feature of Amazon S3 for me is static deployment; it doesn't charge much, and I can integrate CloudFront for DNS and routing. It is very useful and affordable. 

Another valuable feature is versioning, which is critical for data management, allowing data recovery. Moreover, the life cycle policy feature is useful as it automatically manages data, making storage efficient.

The service could improve by offering mobile backups, which would be great since using Google Backup is costly. The complexity of the initial setup due to partitioning data over five GB could also be simplified.

I have been working with Amazon S3 for three months.

Amazon S3 is very stable. I don't worry about data stored in the S3 bucket as it's safe.

Amazon S3's automatic scaling has benefited me, as I don't need to plan storage requirements. I rate scalability as eight out of ten.

I haven't used the technical support team yet, as I have never required it.

Before Amazon S3, I used Google Backup and on-premises infrastructure. I switched due to the cost-effectiveness, scalability, and stability of Amazon S3.

The initial setup was a bit hectic. Uploading data only allows for five GB chunks, creating challenges. Another difficult aspect was managing bucket access policies, which have multiple layers, complicating the setup further.

In my organization, we have one person handling the maintenance of Amazon S3. Implementation involves understanding client architecture, developing cloud architecture, and ensuring security with future requirements.

I don't need to buy infrastructure hardware for backups, which is quite useful and has benefited me.

I rate the pricing as six out of ten. It is somewhat justified due to the benefits, but there is room for reconsideration.

I did not evaluate other options; Amazon S3 was my first choice and currently suits my needs.

New users should not store sensitive data on Amazon S3. Overall, I rate Amazon S3 an eight out of ten.