Select your cookie preferences

We use essential cookies and similar tools that are necessary to provide our site and services. We use performance cookies to collect anonymous statistics, so we can understand how customers use our site and make improvements. Essential cookies cannot be deactivated, but you can choose “Customize” or “Decline” to decline performance cookies.

If you agree, AWS and approved third parties will also use cookies to provide useful site features, remember your preferences, and display relevant content, including relevant advertising. To accept or decline all non-essential cookies, choose “Accept” or “Decline.” To make more detailed choices, choose “Customize.”

Skip to main content

Object storage built to retrieve any amount of data from anywhere

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.

Video Player is loading.

Current Time 0:00

Duration 1:31

Loaded: 0.00%

Remaining Time 1:31

Use cases

Build a data lake

A data lake is a centralized repository that allows you to store all your structured and unstructured data at any scale. You can run data analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and high-performance computing (HPC) applications to unlock the value of your data.

Missing alt text value

Backup and restore critical data

Meet your recovery time objective (RTO), recovery point objective (RPO), and compliance requirements with S3's robust replication functionality, data protection with AWS Backup, and various AWS Partner Network solutions.

Missing alt text value

Archive data at the lowest cost

Move data archives to the Amazon S3 Glacier storage classes to lower costs, eliminate operational complexities, and gain new insights.

The BBC, a UK public service broadcaster, safely migrated its 100-year-old flagship archive to Amazon S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval.

Missing alt text value

Put your data to work

Because Amazon S3 stores more than 500 trillion objects (hundreds of exabytes of data) for virtually any use case and averages over 200 million requests per second, it may be the starting point of your generative AI journey.

  • Grendene is creating a generative AI-based virtual assistant for their sales team using a data lake built on Amazon S3.

Missing alt text value

Customers

Missing alt text value

Industry-leading scalability

“Modernizing the NASCAR technology stack by using AWS Storage is an incredibly monumental step in our overall cloud adoption journey at NASCAR. Migrating all our video, audio, and image libraries to the industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance of Amazon S3 allows us to spend more time developing additional workflows that help our business.” — Chris Wolford, Senior Director of Media and Event Technology, NASCAR Read the NASCAR blog

Missing alt text value

Cost savings

“You think about our 400 percent growth, and that translates into user growth and data growth. Amazon S3 is a massively scalable storage service that we use to serve our growing number of customers worldwide. By optimizing our Amazon S3 usage, we can stretch our IT budgets and extend the impact of our technology.” — Manoj Kalyanaraman, Chief Technology Officer, Dropsuite Read the Dropsuite case study

A close-up view of an advanced audio and video mixing console in a broadcast control room, with illuminated buttons and multiple display monitors in the background.

Preserving history through archives

"We want to have a forward-looking strategy, with tools like flexible storage and compute that facilitate the use of machine learning. Our goal is to safeguard the content in the archives so that it’s accessible for another 100 years.” — Brendan Mallon, head of product and services in BBC Archives Technology and Services

Missing alt text value

A cornerstone solution

“Amazon S3 is the cornerstone of our solution, and it gives us the durability and reliability we need for storing critical data.” — Andre Sublett, Health Cloud, Learning Factory, and Core Services engineer, GE Healthcare Digital Read GE Healthcare Digital case study

How it works

Amazon S3 stores data as objects within buckets. An object is a file and any metadata that describes the file. A bucket is a container for objects. To store your data in Amazon S3, you first create a bucket and specify a bucket name and AWS Region. Then, you upload your data to that bucket as objects in Amazon S3. Each object has a key (or key name), which is the unique identifier for the object within the bucket.

S3 provides features that you can configure to support your specific use case. For example, you can use S3 Versioning to keep multiple versions of an object in the same bucket, which allows you to restore objects that are accidentally deleted or overwritten. Buckets and the objects in them are private and can only be accessed with explicitly granted access permissions. You can use bucket policies, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies, S3 Access Points, and access control lists (ACLs) to manage access.

Get started

Did you find what you were looking for today?

Let us know so we can improve the quality of the content on our pages