Amazon S3: 20 years of building what’s next
From storage for the internet to the data foundation for AI and analytics, Amazon S3 scales and evolves with your ambition
What is Amazon S3?
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service offering industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance. Millions of customers of all sizes and industries store, manage, analyze, and protect any amount of data for virtually any use case, such as data lakes, cloud-native applications, and mobile apps. With cost-effective storage classes and easy-to-use management features, you can optimize costs, organize and analyze data, and configure fine-tuned access controls to meet specific business and compliance requirements.
Page topics
Pricing
Try S3 for free
New AWS customers will receive up to $200 in AWS Free Tier credits, which can be applied towards eligible AWS services, including Amazon S3 with data storage across multiple zones.
Learn more about S3 on the Free Tier
Pay-as-you-go pricing
You pay for storage used, requests made, and data transferred out. Pricing varies by storage class, so you only pay for the performance level you need.
Benefits
Durability and availability
Amazon S3 provides the most durable storage in the cloud and industry leading availability. Based on its unique architecture, S3 is designed to provide 99.999999999% (11 nines) data durability, backed by the strongest SLAs in the cloud.
Virtually unlimited scalability
S3 is fully elastic, automatically growing and shrinking as you add and remove data. There’s no need to provision storage, and you pay only for what you use.
Automatic encryption and access control
Protect your data with unmatched security, data protection, compliance, and access control capabilities. S3 is secure, private, and encrypted by default, and also supports numerous auditing capabilities to monitor access requests to your S3 resources.
Lowest price and highest performance
S3 delivers multiple storage classes with the best price performance for any workload. Store massive amounts of frequently, infrequently, or rarely accessed data cost-efficiently, with the resiliency, flexibility, latency, and throughput to ensure storage never limits performance.
Features
Eight storage classes for every workload
From S3 Standard for frequent access to S3 Express One Zone for single-digit millisecond performance, to S3 Glacier Deep Archive for long-term retention, choose the right storage class to balance performance and cost.
Intelligent cost optimization
S3 Intelligent-Tiering automatically moves data between access tiers based on usage patterns, saving up to 95% on storage costs with no performance impact.
Lifecycle, versioning, and replication
Automate data transitions with Lifecycle policies, preserve every object version with Versioning, and replicate data across Regions for compliance and disaster recovery.
Native table and vector support
S3 Tables delivers built-in Apache Iceberg support with automatic compaction and snapshot management. S3 Vectors provides native vector storage and query for AI applications, reducing vector storage and query costs by up to 90%.
How it works
Objects, buckets, and prefixes
S3 stores data as objects within buckets. Organize objects using prefixes and tags. Create a bucket, choose a Region, and start uploading in minutes.
Strong consistency, every time
S3 delivers read-after-write consistency automatically. Any read request immediately returns the latest version of an object after a successful write.
Security by default
S3 encrypts all new objects by default, blocks public access at the account level, and supports fine-grained access controls, audit logging, and compliance capabilities to protect data at any scale.
Use cases
Data lakes
Run a data lake or lakehouse on S3, the ideal foundation for petabyte-scale analytics and AI. S3 Tables provide fully managed Apache Iceberg tables with automatic compaction and snapshot management to optimize query performance as your data volumes grow.
AI and machine learning
Store training datasets, model artifacts, and diverse data types at scale. Accelerate performance-intensive workloads with S3 Express One Zone, the fastest cloud object storage with single-digit millisecond latency and up to 10x faster data access.
Semantic search
S3 Vectors brings native vector support to S3, allowing you to store and query vector embeddings alongside your source data. Reduce the cost of storing and querying vectors by up to 90% while maintaining subsecond query performance.
Backup, archive, and disaster recovery
Meet your RTO, RPO, and compliance requirements with S3 Replication and AWS Backup. For cost-optimized long-term storage, archive data using S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval, Glacier Flexible Retrieval, or Glacier Deep Archive.
Case studies
See how customers use S3 to securely scale with their needs.
Resources
Documentation
Access comprehensive guides and API references to integrate Amazon S3 into your applications.
Tutorial
Build your S3 skills with hands-on tutorials and self-paced courses on AWS Skill Builder.
Build with popular AWS services that integrate with S3
Discover the latest innovations
See the latest features designed to enhance your S3 experience.
Launching S3 Files, making S3 buckets accessible as file systems
With S3 Files, Amazon S3 is the first and only cloud object store that offers fully-featured, high-performance file system access to your data. It makes your buckets accessible as file systems. This means changes to data on the file system are automatically reflected in the S3 bucket and you have fine-grained control over synchronization.
Introducing account regional namespaces for Amazon S3 general purpose buckets
Learn about the new S3 feature that allows you to create general purpose buckets in your own account regional namespace simplifying bucket creation and management as your data storage needs grow in size and scope.
Twenty years of Amazon S3 and building what’s next
When S3 first launched, it offered approximately one petabyte of total storage capacity across about 400 storage nodes in 15 racks spanning three data centers, with 15 Gbps of total bandwidth. Today, S3 stores more than 500 trillion objects and serves more than 200 million requests per second globally across hundreds of exabytes of data in 123 Availability Zones in 39 AWS Regions, for millions of customers.
Ready to build with industry-leading object storage?
Retrieve any amount of data from anywhere with Amazon S3.
Get started with S3FAQs
Amazon S3 is object storage built to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere. S3 is a simple storage service that offers industry leading durability, availability, performance, security, and virtually unlimited scalability at very low costs.
Amazon S3 provides a simple web service interface that you can use to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere. Using this service, you can easily build applications that make use of cloud native storage. Since Amazon S3 is highly scalable and you only pay for what you use, you can start small and grow your application as you wish, with no compromise on performance or reliability. Amazon S3 is also designed to be highly flexible. Store any type and amount of data that you want, read the same piece of data a million times or only for emergency disaster recovery, build a simple FTP application or a sophisticated web application such as the Amazon.com retail web site. Amazon S3 frees you to focus on innovation instead of spending time figuring out how to store your data.
To sign up for Amazon S3, visit the S3 console. You must have an Amazon Web Services account to access this service. If you do not already have an account, you will be prompted to create one when you begin the Amazon S3 sign-up process. After signing up, refer to the Amazon S3 documentation, view the S3 getting started materials, and see the additional resources in the resource center to begin using Amazon S3.
Amazon S3 lets you leverage Amazon’s own benefits of massive scale with no up-front investment or performance compromises. By using Amazon S3, it is inexpensive and simple to ensure your data is quickly accessible, always available, and secure.
See a list of all FAQs here.
Did you find what you were looking for today?
Let us know so we can improve the quality of the content on our pages