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Amazon S3

Amazon S3

Store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere to power your analytics, applications, and AI workloads.

What is Amazon S3?

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is a fully managed object storage service for storing and retrieving any amount of data at any scale. It offers industry-leading durability, availability, security, and performance, serving millions of customers who build data lakes, cloud-native applications, and AI workloads on AWS. 

How much does S3 cost?

Try S3 for free

New AWS customers receive up to $200 in AWS Free Tier credits, which can be applied towards eligible AWS services, including Amazon S3. The free plan is available for 6 months after account creation.

Learn more about the AWS Free Tier

Pay as you go

Pay only for the storage, requests, and data transfer you use with no upfront commitment.

View detailed pricing

What problems does S3 solve?

Data loss and downtime risk

aws-library_illustration_cloud_11_1200S3 protects data without manual replication management, delivering 99.999999999% (11 nines) durability and 99.99% availability by default. Both figures are backed by the strongest SLAs in the cloud.

Storage capacity planning and provisioning

aws-library_illustration_data_14_1200S3 stores virtually any amount of data, scaling to exabytes without provisioning storage in advance. It grows and shrinks automatically as you add and remove data, so you pay only for what you use with no capacity planning required.

Rising storage costs across access patterns

aws-library_illustration_cloud_1_1200S3 optimizes spend without manual data movement through multiple storage classes and automated lifecycle management. S3 Intelligent-Tiering has saved customers more than $6 billion in storage costs.

Slow access for critical workloads

aws-library_illustration_connect_11_1200S3 Express One Zone accelerates demanding workloads without compromising scale, delivering consistent single-digit millisecond latency and up to 10x faster data access than S3 Standard. This lowers API request costs and total cost of ownership.

How does S3 work?

1. Create a bucket

Create a bucket in your chosen AWS Region. S3 provisions durable, elastic storage that scales automatically as your data grows.

2. Upload objects

Upload objects through the console, API, or SDKs. S3 stores each object with 11 nines durability and encrypts it by default.

3. Choose a storage class

Choose a storage class or enable S3 Intelligent-Tiering. S3 matches cost to access pattern and moves data automatically to optimize spend.

4. Retrieve or query data

Retrieve or query data from analytics, applications, or AI services. S3 integrates directly with AWS analytics and AI/ML services for a fast path from data to intelligence.

Ready to retrieve any amount of data from anywhere?

Get object storage with industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance.
Get started with Amazon S3

Frequently asked questions

    S3 is built for organizations of all sizes storing any amount of data, including teams building data lakes, cloud-native applications, backup and archive systems, and AI workloads. It suits users who need durable, scalable object storage without provisioning capacity or managing storage infrastructure.

    S3 delivers 99.999999999% durability, 99.99% availability, and elastic scale to exabytes with pay-only-for-what-you-use pricing. It includes encryption by default, automated cost optimization through S3 Intelligent-Tiering, and direct integrations across AWS analytics and AI services for a fast path from data to intelligence.

    S3 is secure, private, and encrypted by default. It supports fine-tuned access controls, compliance capabilities, and auditing features that monitor access requests to your resources, so you can meet specific business and regulatory requirements without adding separate security tooling.

    S3 serves as the data foundation for AI, giving you access to structured, unstructured, streaming, and vector data at scale to train, fine-tune, and customize models or improve context through RAG. S3 Vectors adds native vector storage and query for AI applications.

    S3 supports open table formats like Apache Iceberg, letting you query a single reliable copy of data with your preferred AWS or third-party analytics engine. S3 Tables automatically handles compaction, snapshot management, and file cleanup to reduce operational burden as data volumes grow.

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