Getting started with Amazon S3
You can get started with Amazon S3 by working with buckets and objects. A bucket is a container for objects. An object is a file and any metadata that describes that file.
To store an object in Amazon S3, you create a bucket and then upload the object to the bucket. When the object is in the bucket, you can open it, download it, and move it. When you no longer need an object or a bucket, you can clean up your resources.
With Amazon S3, you pay only for what you use. For more information about Amazon S3 features and
pricing, see Amazon S3
Note
For more information about using the Amazon S3 Express One Zone storage class with directory buckets, see Directory buckets and S3 Express One Zone and Directory buckets overview.
Video: Getting started with Amazon S3
Prerequisites
Before you begin, confirm that you've completed the steps in Setting up Amazon S3.
Setting up Amazon S3
When you sign up for Amazon, your Amazon Web Services account is automatically signed up for all services in Amazon, including Amazon S3. You are charged only for the services that you use.
With Amazon S3, you pay only for what you use. For more information about Amazon S3 features and
pricing, see Amazon S3
To set up Amazon S3, use the steps in the following sections.
When you sign up for Amazon and set up Amazon S3, you can optionally change the display language in the Amazon Web Services Management Console. For more information, see Changing the language of the Amazon Web Services Management Console in the Amazon Web Services Management Console Getting Started Guide.
Sign up for an Amazon Web Services account
If you do not have an Amazon Web Services account, use the following procedure to create one.
To sign up for Amazon Web Services
Open http://www.amazonaws.cn/
and choose Sign Up. Follow the on-screen instructions.
Amazon sends you a confirmation email after the sign-up process is
complete. At any time, you can view your current account activity and manage your account by
going to http://www.amazonaws.cn/
Secure IAM users
After you sign up for an Amazon Web Services account, safeguard your administrative user by turning on multi-factor authentication (MFA). For instructions, see Enable a virtual MFA device for an IAM user (console) in the IAM User Guide.
To give other users access to your Amazon Web Services account resources, create IAM users. To secure your IAM users, turn on MFA and only give the IAM users the permissions needed to perform their tasks.
For more information about creating and securing IAM users, see the following topics in the IAM User Guide:
Step 1: Create your first S3 bucket
After you sign up for Amazon, you're ready to create a bucket in Amazon S3 using the Amazon Web Services Management Console. Every object in Amazon S3 is stored in a bucket. Before you can store data in Amazon S3, you must create a bucket.
Note
For more information about using the Amazon S3 Express One Zone storage class with directory buckets, see Directory buckets and S3 Express One Zone and Directory buckets overview.
Note
You are not charged for creating a bucket. You are charged only for storing objects in the
bucket and for transferring objects in and out of the bucket. The charges that you incur
through following the examples in this guide are minimal (less than $1). For more information
about storage charges, see Amazon S3
pricing
Sign in to the Amazon Web Services Management Console and open the Amazon S3 console at https://console.amazonaws.cn/s3/
. -
In the navigation bar on the top of the page, choose the name of the currently displayed Amazon Web Services Region. Next, choose the Region in which you want to create a bucket.
Note
To minimize latency and costs and address regulatory requirements, choose a Region close to you. Objects stored in a Region never leave that Region unless you explicitly transfer them to another Region. For a list of Amazon S3 Amazon Web Services Regions, see Amazon Web Services service endpoints in the Amazon Web Services General Reference.
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In the left navigation pane, choose Buckets.
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Choose Create bucket.
The Create bucket page opens.
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Under General configuration, view the Amazon Web Services Region where your bucket will be created.
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Under Bucket type, choose General purpose.
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For Bucket name, enter a name for your bucket.
The bucket name must:
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Be unique within a partition. A partition is a grouping of Regions. Amazon currently has three partitions:
aws
(Standard Regions),aws-cn
(China Regions), andaws-us-gov
(Amazon GovCloud (US) Regions). -
Be between 3 and 63 characters long.
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Consist only of lowercase letters, numbers, dots (.), and hyphens (-). For best compatibility, we recommend that you avoid using dots (.) in bucket names, except for buckets that are used only for static website hosting.
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Begin and end with a letter or number.
After you create the bucket, you cannot change its name. The Amazon Web Services account that creates the bucket owns it. For more information about naming buckets, see Bucket naming rules.
Important
Avoid including sensitive information, such as account numbers, in the bucket name. The bucket name is visible in the URLs that point to the objects in the bucket.
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Amazon Web Services Management Console allows you to copy an existing bucket's settings to your new bucket. If you do not want to copy the settings of an existing bucket, skip to the next step.
Note
This option:
Is not available in the Amazon CLI and is only available in console
Is not available for directory buckets
Does not copy the bucket policy from the existing bucket to the new bucket
To copy an existing bucket's settings, under Copy settings from existing bucket, select Choose bucket. The Choose bucket window opens. Find the bucket with the settings that you would like to copy, and select Choose bucket. The Choose bucket window closes, and the Create bucket window re-opens.
Under Copy settings from existing bucket, you will now see the name of the bucket you selected. You will also see a Restore defaults option that you can use to remove the copied bucket settings. Review the remaining bucket settings, on the Create bucket page. You will see that they now match the settings of the bucket that you selected. You can skip to the final step.
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Under Object Ownership, to disable or enable ACLs and control ownership of objects uploaded in your bucket, choose one of the following settings:
ACLs disabled
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Bucket owner enforced (default) – ACLs are disabled, and the bucket owner automatically owns and has full control over every object in the bucket. ACLs no longer affect access permissions to data in the S3 bucket. The bucket uses policies exclusively to define access control.
By default, ACLs are disabled. A majority of modern use cases in Amazon S3 no longer require the use of ACLs. We recommend that you keep ACLs disabled, except in unusual circumstances where you must control access for each object individually. For more information, see Controlling ownership of objects and disabling ACLs for your bucket.
ACLs enabled
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Bucket owner preferred – The bucket owner owns and has full control over new objects that other accounts write to the bucket with the
bucket-owner-full-control
canned ACL.If you apply the Bucket owner preferred setting, to require all Amazon S3 uploads to include the
bucket-owner-full-control
canned ACL, you can add a bucket policy that allows only object uploads that use this ACL. -
Object writer – The Amazon Web Services account that uploads an object owns the object, has full control over it, and can grant other users access to it through ACLs.
Note
The default setting is Bucket owner enforced. To apply the default setting and keep ACLs disabled, only the
s3:CreateBucket
permission is needed. To enable ACLs, you must have thes3:PutBucketOwnershipControls
permission. -
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Under Block Public Access settings for this bucket, choose the Block Public Access settings that you want to apply to the bucket.
By default, all four Block Public Access settings are enabled. We recommend that you keep all settings enabled, unless you know that you need to turn off one or more of them for your specific use case. For more information about blocking public access, see Blocking public access to your Amazon S3 storage.
Note
To enable all Block Public Access settings, only the
s3:CreateBucket
permission is required. To turn off any Block Public Access settings, you must have thes3:PutBucketPublicAccessBlock
permission. -
(Optional) Under Bucket Versioning, you can choose if you wish to keep variants of objects in your bucket. For more information about versioning, see Retaining multiple versions of objects with S3 Versioning.
To disable or enable versioning on your bucket, choose either Disable or Enable.
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(Optional) Under Tags, you can choose to add tags to your bucket. Tags are key-value pairs used to categorize storage.
To add a bucket tag, enter a Key and optionally a Value and choose Add Tag.
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Under Default encryption, choose Edit.
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To configure default encryption, under Encryption type, choose one of the following:
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Amazon S3 managed key (SSE-S3)
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Amazon Key Management Service key (SSE-KMS)
Important
If you use the SSE-KMS option for your default encryption configuration, you are subject to the requests per second (RPS) quota of Amazon KMS. For more information about Amazon KMS quotas and how to request a quota increase, see Quotas in the Amazon Key Management Service Developer Guide.
Buckets and new objects are encrypted with server-side encryption with an Amazon S3 managed key as the base level of encryption configuration. For more information about default encryption, see Setting default server-side encryption behavior for Amazon S3 buckets.
For more information about using Amazon S3 server-side encryption to encrypt your data, see Using server-side encryption with Amazon S3 managed keys (SSE-S3).
-
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If you chose Amazon Key Management Service key (SSE-KMS), do the following:
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Under Amazon KMS key, specify your KMS key in one of the following ways:
-
To choose from a list of available KMS keys, choose Choose from your Amazon KMS keys, and choose your KMS key from the list of available keys.
Both the Amazon managed key (
aws/s3
) and your customer managed keys appear in this list. For more information about customer managed keys, see Customer keys and Amazon keys in the Amazon Key Management Service Developer Guide. -
To enter the KMS key ARN, choose Enter Amazon KMS key ARN, and enter your KMS key ARN in the field that appears.
-
To create a new customer managed key in the Amazon KMS console, choose Create a KMS key.
For more information about creating an Amazon KMS key, see Creating keys in the Amazon Key Management Service Developer Guide.
Important
You can use only KMS keys that are available in the same Amazon Web Services Region as the bucket. The Amazon S3 console lists only the first 100 KMS keys in the same Region as the bucket. To use a KMS key that is not listed, you must enter your KMS key ARN. If you want to use a KMS key that is owned by a different account, you must first have permission to use the key and then you must enter the KMS key ARN. For more information on cross account permissions for KMS keys, see Creating KMS keys that other accounts can use in the Amazon Key Management Service Developer Guide. For more information on SSE-KMS, see Specifying server-side encryption with Amazon KMS (SSE-KMS).
When you use an Amazon KMS key for server-side encryption in Amazon S3, you must choose a symmetric encryption KMS key. Amazon S3 supports only symmetric encryption KMS keys and not asymmetric KMS keys. For more information, see Identifying symmetric and asymmetric KMS keys in the Amazon Key Management Service Developer Guide.
For more information about creating an Amazon KMS key, see Creating keys in the Amazon Key Management Service Developer Guide. For more information about using Amazon KMS with Amazon S3, see Using server-side encryption with Amazon KMS keys (SSE-KMS).
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When you configure your bucket to use default encryption with SSE-KMS, you can also enable S3 Bucket Keys. S3 Bucket Keys lower the cost of encryption by decreasing request traffic from Amazon S3 to Amazon KMS. For more information, see Reducing the cost of SSE-KMS with Amazon S3 Bucket Keys.
To use S3 Bucket Keys, under Bucket Key, choose Enable.
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(Optional) If you want to enable S3 Object Lock, do the following:
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Choose Advanced settings.
Important
Enabling Object Lock also enables versioning for the bucket. After enabling you must configure the Object Lock default retention and legal hold settings to protect new objects from being deleted or overwritten.
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If you want to enable Object Lock, choose Enable, read the warning that appears, and acknowledge it.
For more information, see Locking objects with Object Lock.
Note
To create an Object Lock enabled bucket, you must have the following permissions:
s3:CreateBucket
,s3:PutBucketVersioning
ands3:PutBucketObjectLockConfiguration
. -
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Choose Create bucket.
You've created a bucket in Amazon S3.
Next step
To add an object to your bucket, see Step 2: Upload an object to your bucket.
Step 2: Upload an object to your bucket
After creating a bucket in Amazon S3, you're ready to upload an object to the bucket. An object can be any kind of file: a text file, a photo, a video, and so on.
Note
For more information about using the Amazon S3 Express One Zone storage class with directory buckets, see Directory buckets and S3 Express One Zone and Directory buckets overview.
To upload an object to a bucket
Open the Amazon S3 console at https://console.amazonaws.cn/s3/
. -
In the Buckets list, choose the name of the bucket that you want to upload your object to.
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On the Objects tab for your bucket, choose Upload.
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Under Files and folders, choose Add files.
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Choose a file to upload, and then choose Open.
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Choose Upload.
You've successfully uploaded an object to your bucket.
Next step
To view your object, see Step 3: Download an object.
Step 3: Download an object
After you upload an object to a bucket, you can view information about your object and download the object to your local computer.
Note
For more information about using the Amazon S3 Express One Zone storage class with directory buckets, see Directory buckets and S3 Express One Zone and Directory buckets overview.
Using the S3 console
This section explains how to use the Amazon S3 console to download an object from an S3 bucket.
Note
-
You can download only one object at a time.
-
If you use the Amazon S3 console to download an object whose key name ends with a period (
.
), the period is removed from the key name of the downloaded object. To retain the period at the end of the name of the downloaded object, you must use the Amazon Command Line Interface (Amazon CLI), Amazon SDKs, or Amazon S3 REST API.
To download an object from an S3 bucket
-
Sign in to the Amazon Web Services Management Console and open the Amazon S3 console at https://console.amazonaws.cn/s3/
. -
In the Buckets list, choose the name of the bucket that you want to download an object from.
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You can download an object from an S3 bucket in any of the following ways:
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Select the check box next to the object, and choose Download. If you want to download the object to a specific folder, on the Actions menu, choose Download as.
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If you want to download a specific version of the object, turn on Show versions (located next to the search box). Select the check box next to the version of the object that you want, and choose Download. If you want to download the object to a specific folder, on the Actions menu, choose Download as.
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You've successfully downloaded your object.
Next step
To copy and paste your object within Amazon S3, see Step 4: Copy your object to a folder.
Step 4: Copy your object to a folder
You've already added an object to a bucket and downloaded the object. Now, you create a folder and copy the object and paste it into the folder.
Note
For more information about using the Amazon S3 Express One Zone storage class with directory buckets, see Directory buckets and S3 Express One Zone and Directory buckets overview.
To copy an object to a folder
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In the Buckets list, choose your bucket name.
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Choose Create folder and configure a new folder:
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Enter a folder name (for example,
favorite-pics
). -
For the folder encryption setting, choose Disable.
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Choose Save.
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Navigate to the Amazon S3 bucket or folder that contains the objects that you want to copy.
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Select the check box to the left of the names of the objects that you want to copy.
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Choose Actions and choose Copy from the list of options that appears.
Alternatively, choose Copy from the options in the upper right.
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Choose the destination folder:
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Choose Browse S3.
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Choose the option button to the left of the folder name.
To navigate into a folder and choose a subfolder as your destination, choose the folder name.
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Choose Choose destination.
The path to your destination folder appears in the Destination box. In Destination, you can alternately enter your destination path, for example, s3://
bucket-name
/folder-name
/. -
-
In the bottom right, choose Copy.
Amazon S3 copies your objects to the destination folder.
Next step
To delete an object and a bucket in Amazon S3, see Step 5: Delete your objects and bucket.
Step 5: Delete your objects and bucket
When you no longer need an object or a bucket, we recommend that you delete them to prevent further charges. If you completed this getting started walkthrough as a learning exercise, and you don't plan to use your bucket or objects, we recommend that you delete your bucket and objects so that charges no longer accrue.
Before you delete your bucket, empty the bucket or delete the objects in the bucket. After you delete your objects and bucket, they are no longer available.
If you want to continue to use the same bucket name, we recommend that you delete the objects or empty the bucket, but don't delete the bucket. After you delete a bucket, the name becomes available to reuse. However, another Amazon Web Services account might create a bucket with the same name before you have a chance to reuse it.
Note
For more information about using the Amazon S3 Express One Zone storage class with directory buckets, see Directory buckets and S3 Express One Zone and Directory buckets overview.
Deleting an object
If you want to choose which objects you delete without emptying all the objects from your bucket, you can delete an object.
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In the Buckets list, choose the name of the bucket that you want to delete an object from.
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Select the object that you want to delete.
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Choose Delete from the options in the upper right.
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On the Delete objects page, type
delete
to confirm deletion of your objects. -
Choose Delete objects.
Emptying your bucket
If you plan to delete your bucket, you must first empty your bucket, which deletes all the objects in the bucket.
To empty a bucket
-
In the Buckets list, select the bucket that you want to empty, and then choose Empty.
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To confirm that you want to empty the bucket and delete all the objects in it, in Empty bucket, type
permanently delete
.Important
Emptying the bucket cannot be undone. Objects added to the bucket while the empty bucket action is in progress will be deleted.
-
To empty the bucket and delete all the objects in it, and choose Empty.
An Empty bucket: Status page opens that you can use to review a summary of failed and successful object deletions.
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To return to your bucket list, choose Exit.
Deleting your bucket
After you empty your bucket or delete all the objects from your bucket, you can delete your bucket.
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To delete a bucket, in the Buckets list, select the bucket.
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Choose Delete.
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To confirm deletion, in Delete bucket, type the name of the bucket.
Important
Deleting a bucket cannot be undone. Bucket names are unique. If you delete your bucket, another Amazon user can use the name. If you want to continue to use the same bucket name, don't delete your bucket. Instead, empty and keep the bucket.
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To delete your bucket, choose Delete bucket.
Next steps
In the preceding examples, you learned how to perform some basic Amazon S3 tasks.
The following topics explain the learning paths that you can use to gain a deeper understanding of Amazon S3 so that you can implement it in your applications.
Note
For more information about using the Amazon S3 Express One Zone storage class with directory buckets, see Directory buckets and S3 Express One Zone and Directory buckets overview.
Topics
Understand common use cases
You can use Amazon S3 to support your specific use case. The Amazon Solutions
Library
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Backup and storage – Use Amazon S3 storage management features to manage costs, meet regulatory requirements, reduce latency, and save multiple distinct copies of your data for compliance requirements.
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Application hosting – Deploy, install, and manage web applications that are reliable, highly scalable, and low-cost. For example, you can configure your Amazon S3 bucket to host a static website. For more information, see Hosting a static website using Amazon S3.
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Media hosting – Build a highly available infrastructure that hosts video, photo, or music uploads and downloads.
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Software delivery – Host your software applications for customers to download.
Control access to your buckets and objects
Amazon S3 provides a variety of security features and tools. For an overview, see Access control in Amazon S3.
By default, S3 buckets and the objects in them are private. You have access only to the S3 resources that you create. You can use the following features to grant granular resource permissions that support your specific use case or to audit the permissions of your Amazon S3 resources.
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S3 Block Public Access – Block public access to S3 buckets and objects. By default, Block Public Access settings are turned on at the bucket level.
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Amazon Identity and Access Management (IAM) identities – Use IAM or Amazon IAM Identity Center to create IAM identities in your Amazon Web Services account to manage access to your Amazon S3 resources. For example, you can use IAM with Amazon S3 to control the type of access that a user or group of users has to an Amazon S3 bucket that your Amazon Web Services account owns. For more information about IAM identities and best practices, see IAM identities (users, user groups, and roles) in the IAM User Guide.
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Bucket policies – Use IAM-based policy language to configure resource-based permissions for your S3 buckets and the objects in them.
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Access control lists (ACLs) – Grant read and write permissions for individual buckets and objects to authorized users. As a general rule, we recommend using S3 resource-based policies (bucket policies and access point policies) or IAM user policies for access control instead of ACLs. Policies are a simplified and more flexible access-control option. With bucket policies and access point policies, you can define rules that apply broadly across all requests to your Amazon S3 resources. For more information about the specific cases when you'd use ACLs instead of resource-based policies or IAM user policies, see Identity and Access Management for Amazon S3.
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S3 Object Ownership – Take ownership of every object in your bucket, simplifying access management for data stored in Amazon S3. S3 Object Ownership is an Amazon S3 bucket-level setting that you can use to disable or enable ACLs. By default, ACLs are disabled. With ACLs disabled, the bucket owner owns all the objects in the bucket and manages access to data exclusively by using access-management policies.
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IAM Access Analyzer for S3 – Evaluate and monitor your S3 bucket access policies, ensuring that the policies provide only the intended access to your S3 resources.
Protect and monitor your storage
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Protecting your storage – After you create buckets and upload objects in Amazon S3, you can protect your object storage. For example, you can use S3 Versioning, S3 Replication, and Multi-Region Access Point failover controls for disaster recovery, Amazon Backup to back up your data, and S3 Object Lock to set retention periods, prevent deletions and overwrites, and meet compliance requirements.
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Monitoring your storage – Monitoring is an important part of maintaining the reliability, availability, and performance of Amazon S3 and your Amazon solutions. You can monitor storage activity and costs. Also, we recommend that you collect monitoring data from all the parts of your Amazon solution so that you can more easily debug a multipoint failure if one occurs.
You can also use analytics and insights in Amazon S3 to understand, analyze, and optimize your storage usage. For example, use Amazon S3 Storage Lens to understand, analyze, and optimize your storage. S3 Storage Lens provides 29+ usage and activity metrics and interactive dashboards to aggregate data for your entire organization, specific accounts, Regions, buckets, or prefixes. Use Storage Class Analysis to analyze storage access patterns to decide when it's time to move your data to a more cost-effective storage class. To manage your costs, you can use S3 Lifecycle.
Develop with Amazon S3
Amazon S3 is a REST service. You can send requests to Amazon S3 using the REST API or the Amazon SDK libraries, which wrap the underlying Amazon S3 REST API, simplifying your programming tasks. You can also use the Amazon Command Line Interface (Amazon CLI) to make Amazon S3 API calls. For more information, see Making requests in the Amazon S3 API Reference.
The Amazon S3 REST API is an HTTP interface to Amazon S3. With the REST API, you use standard HTTP requests to create, fetch, and delete buckets and objects. To use the REST API, you can use any toolkit that supports HTTP. You can even use a browser to fetch objects, as long as they are anonymously readable. For more information, see Developing with Amazon S3 in the Amazon S3 API Reference.
To help you build applications using the language of your choice, we provide the following resources.
Amazon CLI
You can access the features of Amazon S3 using the Amazon CLI. To download and configure the Amazon CLI, see Developing with Amazon S3 using the Amazon CLI in the Amazon S3 API Reference.
The Amazon CLI provides two tiers of commands for accessing
Amazon S3: High-level (s3) commands and API-level (s3api and s3control
commands. The high-level S3
commands simplify performing common tasks, such as
creating, manipulating, and deleting objects and
buckets. The s3api and s3control commands expose direct
access to all Amazon S3 API operations, which you can use to
carry out advanced operations that might not be possible
with the high-level commands alone.
For a list of Amazon S3 Amazon CLI commands, see s3
Amazon SDKs and Explorers
You can use the Amazon SDKs when developing applications with Amazon S3. The Amazon SDKs simplify your programming tasks by wrapping the underlying REST API. The Amazon Mobile SDKs and the Amplify JavaScript library are also available for building connected mobile and web applications using Amazon.
In addition to the Amazon SDKs, Amazon Explorers are available for Visual Studio and Eclipse for Java IDE. In this case, the SDKs and the explorers are bundled together as Amazon Toolkits.
For more information, see Developing with Amazon S3 using the Amazon SDKs in the Amazon S3 API Reference.
Sample Code and Libraries
The Amazon
Developer Center
Learn from tutorials
You can get started with step-by-step tutorials to learn more about Amazon S3. These tutorials are intended for a lab-type environment, and they use fictitious company names, user names, and so on. Their purpose is to provide general guidance. They are not intended for direct use in a production environment without careful review and adaptation to meet the unique needs of your organization's environment.
Getting started
Optimizing storage costs
Managing storage
Hosting videos and websites
Processing data
Protecting data
Explore training and support
You can learn from Amazon experts to advance your skills and get expert assistance achieving your objectives.
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Training – Training resources provide a hands-on approach to learning Amazon S3. For more information, see Amazon training and certification
and Amazon online tech talks . -
Discussion Forums – On the forum, you can review posts to understand what you can and can't do with Amazon S3. You can also post your questions. For more information, see Discussion Forums
. -
Technical Support – If you have further questions, you can contact Technical Support
.