Amazon S3 Advantages And Disadvantages

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)

INTRODUCTION: Amazon Simple Storage Service is storage for the Internet. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. Amazon S3 has a simple web services interface that you can use to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites.

Advantages to Amazon S3
Amazon S3 is intentionally built with a minimal feature set that focuses on simplicity and robustness. Following are some of advantages of the Amazon S3 service

• Create Buckets – Create and name a bucket that stores data. Buckets

Amazon S3 Concepts

Buckets
A bucket is a container for objects stored in Amazon S3. Every object is contained in a bucket. For example, if the object named photos/puppy.jpg is stored in the johnsmith bucket, then it is addressable using the URL http://johnsmith.s3.amazonaws.com/photos/puppy.jpg
Buckets serve several purposes: they organize the Amazon S3 namespace at the highest level, they identify the account responsible for storage and data transfer charges, they play a role in access control, and they serve as the unit of aggregation for usage reporting.
You can configure buckets so that they are created in a specific region. For more information, see Buckets and Regions. You can also configure a bucket so that every time an object is added to it, Amazon S3 generates a unique version ID and assigns it to the object. For more information, see Versioning.
For more information about buckets, see Working with Amazon S3 Buckets.

Objects consist of object data and metadata. The data portion is opaque to Amazon S3. The metadata is a set of name-value pairs that describe the object. These include some default metadata, such as the date last modified, and standard HTTP metadata, such as Content-Type. You can also specify custom metadata at the time the object is stored.

Keys
A key is the unique identifier for an object within a bucket. Every object in a bucket has exactly one key. Because the combination of a bucket, key, and version ID uniquely identify each object, Amazon S3 can be thought of as a basic data map between "bucket + key + version" and the object itself. Every object in Amazon S3 can be uniquely addressed through the combination of the web service endpoint, bucket name, key, and optionally, a version. For example, in the URL http://doc.s3.amazonaws.com/2006-03-01/AmazonS3.wsdl, "doc" is the name of the bucket and
"2006-03-01/AmazonS3.wsdl" is the