Amazon S3 Reviews

I use Amazon S3 mostly to store files. Instead of storing files in a blob, I store them in Amazon S3 and give the reference to my database. At any point in time, if I want to process the files, I get them from Amazon and process them.

Amazon S3 is scalable and available. It's particularly useful for archiving data; I can configure it to keep files for six months before archiving them to Glacier. This flexibility in retrieving data or storing it makes it valuable.

Sometimes, there is latency in getting data, especially if the file size is large. This could be improved.

I have been using Amazon S3 for about five years.

There is no need to maintain Amazon S3, although latency can occur when retrieving large files.

Amazon S3 is scalable.

I rate the technical support from Amazon for S3 a ten out of ten.

Positive

Since S3 is cloud-based, the initial setup is very straightforward, without any installation required.

S3 is a pay-as-you-go service. I pay based on the data volume I am using.

I rate Amazon S3 overall ten points out of ten. 

For handling data retrieval and access management in S3, I use IAMs to specify who can access data and what actions they can perform. One potential drawback is related to the naming of the S3 buckets. Bucket names are global, not local, which means if someone else attempts to access a bucket with the same name, I could be charged for their access attempt.

I have different use cases. One major one is hosting static content for our legacy front-end application. We deploy all the static files to an S3 bucket, which is configured for web hosting. 

Additionally, we have an Akamai layer on top of S3, so all requests first hit Akamai and are then routed to S3, according to our HTML routing, before reaching the backend service.

It's very well secured. We have S3 policies that allow you to write custom policies. These control access to the users and can grant or deny permissions. Additionally, your buckets can be configured as private or public.

Amazon S3 offers multiple beneficial features. One advantage is static web hosting, which eliminates the need for a dedicated server. We also have S3 for storage, where we can upload necessary files for processing. 

Furthermore, it supports an SFTP service, where we set up an SFTP server on top of S3 and use credentials to transfer data from remote locations. 

S3's lifecycle policies are also crucial; they automate the deletion or downgrading of files that are no longer needed. Moreover, we can set permissions to restrict or allow user access to the data.

Using S3, we can load data into databases and trigger AWS Lambda functions, which enhances our operational flexibility.

Sometimes while using S3, I've wished for certain features.

One thing would be automatic replication between buckets, some feature like that.

I have been using it for more than five years. 

It's almost 100% stable. I've never seen S3 go down. It's always available. As mentioned in the documentation, it has 99.999999999% availability.

I would rate the stability a ten out of ten.

There are two aspects to consider regarding S3 scalability. While there is a hard limit of thousands of buckets per AWS account, there's virtually no limit on the amount of data you can store within a single S3 bucket.

Anyone with access to our AWS accounts has the potential to use S3. But in terms of my applications, nearly all of them utilize S3 in some way or another.

The customer service and support are highly skilled and technical. Whenever I have issues with any service, whether it's S3 or something else, I always get a resolution.

The response time is good. I've always been able to connect with an agent and resolve the issue on the spot.

Positive

There's Azure Block Storage and Google Cloud Storage.  

The initial setup is very straightforward. You just need to provide the bucket name, the region where you want it created, and some basic permissions. It's a three or four-step process.

Currently, I use the public cloud for my entire infrastructure. All the deployments are in the cloud.

The pricing is good. The main charges for S3 are data transfer and storage. You can create as many buckets as you need and manage them according to your requirements. Naturally, the more you use any service, the higher the cost.

I find it very useful. It's one of the best services out there. I'd give it a nine out of ten. I would recommend it – every user should utilize it for storage.

One of the use cases is to store Veeam backups. It's more complex than Veeam, which is simpler.

S3 is essentially object storage, a place to store data that you can set up however you want. We usually connect to S3 using the API. It requires an access key and a secret key, which we input into the application we're connecting from. Then, that application can see the S3 bucket as if it were local, and we can copy stuff into it.

The best thing about S3 is the security. I can enable encryption at rest using a KMS server, a key management server. Key management servers encrypt data, and you need the key to decrypt it. Without the key, you can't access the data. Amazon allows you to use your own servers or theirs. They offer Amazon encryption, which you decide on when you create the bucket. The bucket also has all the other features like versioning.

We can do versioning and life cycles. The biggest plus for me as a storage admin is the different tiers: standard, infrequent access, Glacier, and Glacier Deep Archive. The differences between these tiers are cost and data retrieval speed. Standard tier data is considered "hot," meaning it's accessible anytime, but it's expensive.

If you want to archive data you won't need often, or if you have ample time to retrieve a backup, the most cost-effective option is Glacier Deep Archive. It's very cheap, but the disadvantage is that when you request data, it takes up to 24 hours to become accessible.

There are no limitations on how much you can store, but the biggest limitation is that you cannot use Glacier Deep Archive from the console. You can't go into the AWS console and copy something directly into Deep Glacier, but you can do it from the command line. If you have programmatic access, there's a command to put data directly into Glacier Deep Archive.

We don't use anything AI on AWS right now. The AI stuff isn't really too useful for us yet. We're just playing around with Copilot from Microsoft, which is more on the Azure side. We haven't leveraged any AWS AI stuff yet. We've basically just been playing around with Amazon Bedrock, but haven't done anything in production with it.

There's a lot of complexity, but that's unavoidable because it needs to be versatile. You have to be able to get the data in many different ways. 

For example, if you need to give just one file to someone outside the office, you can create a temporary pre-signed URL for them to access it. That takes a little bit of fiddling with the settings, but it's not really a disadvantage. It's just part of the system. There's no real way to make that easier. The more secure something is, the more complex it will be.

We're not dealing with it extensively right now. We're studying migrating to AWS resources but haven't moved much yet. We've mainly been doing proof of concepts and testing. S3 is what we've been using the most, though.

It's a little bit harder to get the customer service and support compared to Veeam. Veeam is very good, definitely a ten out of ten. 

Amazon support so far has been maybe a seven out of ten.

Neutral

The initial setup is complex in the sense that you need to know what will access the data and what won't. That's the biggest issue. For example, let's say you have an EC2 instance that needs to access an S3 bucket, but everything else needs to be locked out. There are several ways to do that, like creating a bucket policy and allowing only the EC2 resource to access it. That requires creating a role.

On the other hand, if you just want a public S3 bucket where everyone has access to unprotected data, like public documentation on a product, that's very easy to set up.

So, it can be as easy or as complex as you need it to be.

I tool care of the solution. It's me and my colleague who is more on the vSphere and storage admin side, and one of the networking guys to help with the networking portion.

Once it's set up, there's really no maintenance.

We don't expect to see ROI at the moment, but we're hoping to see some returns once we start moving data loads to the cloud. Then, we can start decommissioning a lot of the on-premises hardware. We'll need less storage and computing as more gets deployed to the cloud.

The licensing model is complex. If you need your backup data available at all times, but don't access it frequently, there are better options. You could go with S3, but other vendors offer the same thing for much better prices. For example, Wasabi has S3-compatible hot storage and charges a lot less.

The disadvantage of Wasabi is that they don't want you accessing the data frequently. They say you can have it right away if you need it, but if you keep accessing it all the time, you're going beyond their service agreement. At that point, you'd need to go with an Amazon solution.

If you're going to store data in an archive that you don't need to access frequently and can wait up to 24 hours to retrieve, then Amazon is a good solution.

Amazon would definitely be a seven out of ten, where one is the lowest price and ten is the most expensive.

I would recommend it as part of a good backup strategy. The 3-2-1 approach suggests having three hot copies, two cold storage copies, and one off-site copy. That off-site copy could definitely be an S3 bucket. So I would recommend it in that sense.

Overall, I would rate it a seven out of ten because it's great for general storage. If you need to access a lot of data all the time and it needs to be fast, then it's not the best solution. There are better solutions out there.

I use the solution in my company for different purposes. Currently, we just store some data there, like the backups we store or data that is not regularly accessed. We mostly use the tool to store data. It is actually for object storage, so too many objects we store in it.

With Amazon S3, we can manage everything through GUI as well as the command line interface, which is a good thing. Using versioning in S3 buckets is a good feature.

The tool's speed is comparatively low, especially considering that there are some other services where we can store data, like EBS. The speed is a little slower in Amazon S3. I don't know the solution for that, but Amazon can add some features to improve its speed.

I have been using Amazon S3 for three to four years. I am just a user of the tool.

If we have critical data, we store it in multiple regions. The cloud provides multiple regions or multiple easy options. The tool does not cause much downtime.

I work as a DevOps SRE engineer, along with five more members of my team, and we all use Amazon S3.

My company contacts the tool's support for billing-related issues. My company does not regularly contact the tool's support team. Most of the things related to the tool are available in the document.

The product's deployment phase is easy. We can do it using the command line interface and codes, Terraform, or some scripts. You can use the consoles as well for easy understanding.

We can manage the S3 buckets based on the requirements. There are different categories available, like reducing it if we don't have enough money to store it in multiple locations. Different standards, such as different S3 options, are available. One can manage the price of the tool. The tool is worth the money if we want to store the data in Amazon S3. We are storing things in Amazon S3 or wherever there is a remote cloud server so that you can access the data anywhere in the world. If your data needs to be accessed from anywhere in the world, you can store it on your local drive. You can set up a local system, but storing it in Amazon S3 means you can access it all over the world. There is no need for much configuration. The cloud providers provide a pay-as-you-use model. There is no need to pay for any setups. Based on data size, upload, and download requests, some money gets charged. It is easy to control pricing on the cloud. There is no need to have a deep knowledge of setting up the servers in the data center or in a local environment.

Firstly, one should try using the Amazon or AWS console itself. You can move the mouse around and find where the configuration things are there, how to create buckets, versioning, and other things, like downloading, uploading, and everything else. Learn the console and its basics. Secondly, you can move to the command line interface. With the command line interface, we can easily manage available AWS commands or AWS CLI options. Later, we can move to scripting. Using scripts, we can do the uploads, downloads, and changes, and all those things.

I believe it is easier to learn the tool than to learn the administrative skills needed to set up the servers or networks for the data configurations. It is a much more advanced task. Setting up Amazon S3 or using a cloud service is the easiest thing you can learn. You will get the tool's documents everywhere, explaining how to use the tool. Anyone, including non-technical people, can learn to use Amazon S3 and other cloud services.

I rate the tool a nine out of ten.

Amazon S3 is used for storage service. It's designed for 99.9% durability; hence, our data is highly protected against failures.

The most valuable feature of Amazon S3 is the data transfer acceleration because it can enable fast, easy, and secure data transfer.

The solution's cost should be improved.

The solution's performance needs to increase for small objects. Amazon S3 is excellent for large projects, but its performance can be comparatively slower for fewer small objects.

Amazon S3 is a stable solution.

Around 2,000 to 3,000 users use Amazon S3 in our organization.

The solution's initial setup is easy.

While storing data in Amazon S3 is relatively inexpensive, there are costs associated with retrieving or transferring data across continents. Connecting Amazon S3 with real-time applications can increase data retrieval costs.

Amazon S3 is deployed on-cloud in our organization. Our company decided to use Amazon S3 because of its global availability. AWS has multiple data centers around the world.

If you're using the public cloud, using Amazon S3 combined with Amazon S3 Glacier is correct. The data will be stored in Amazon S3 storage, and the cost will increase. Instead of keeping the data in Amazon S3, putting the archive file in Amazon S3 Glacier is better.

Overall, I rate Amazon S3 a nine out of ten.

I use the solution in my company mostly to store files. It is a file storage service.

I use many features in the tool, including data life cycle, automatic cleanup, and life cycle policies. I also use the tool's single-pane-of-glass view and dashboard. I don't know specifically what the important features are in the tool. The durability and availability features of Amazon S3 are amazing.

Everything around visibility, dashboards, and all of the statistics through which the tool provides information 24 hours a day means that it is not done on a real-time basis. It's sometimes needed for users to see some real-time information immediately and not have to wait for 24t hours till a report is generated. For me, getting reports on a real-time basis is critical, and it is an area that is missing in Amazon S3.

For the cleanup policy, when I opened a couple of tickets with the tool's support team, I did not get any clear information on how to deal with the restoration part. When my company approached the tool's technical support with some questions about how to organize data, view it, and how it is distributed across the buckets, we did not receive any clear answers. The tool's support team needs to improve.

I have been using Amazon S3 for ten years. I am an end user of the solution.

It is a very good and stable solution. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

The tool offers great scalability to its users. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

At least half of my organization uses the tool. Most of our company's applications deploy, provide, or utilize the services offered by Amazon S3.

The tool is used on a daily basis.

For the service provided by the solution's technical support, I rate the technical support a six to seven out of ten.

Neutral

With Amazon, you don't have any other equivalent services, so Amazon S3 is a standard tool to use. In other environments, very different services, very similar to Amazon S3, are present on GCP and Azure. On other platforms, we use the services provided by other clouds.

The product's initial setup phase is very easy.

The solution is deployed on the cloud. The tool can be deployed on an on-premises model.

The solution can be deployed in a few seconds.

Speaking about whether I have seen an ROI from using the tool, I would say that I know that it contains life cycle policies.

The tool's price is a little bit high, but it is reasonable.

The product is very deeply integrated with some of the tools that I use in my company. Amazon S3 is a part of the platform applications that we create and provide to customers.

I recommend the tool to others.

I rate the tool a seven to eight out of ten.

We use Amazon S3 for data storage purposes. We use the stored data for restoration or backup when there is a data leakage in websites and mobile applications. For enterprise-level applications, the stored data is also used for data analytics, backup, recovery, etc.

The tool helps us with data backup storage of payment files and helps us avoid issues with clients when we miss the data. For instance, in the payment file of my Google client, you can find details of one-to-one transactions like the payment information on the file header, payment ID, payment client ID, group headers, etc. We get these details into the file format of ISO which is the accepted format at JP Morgan & Chase. Once we get the file format, we process it through S3.

In S3, we do the syncing process where everything is automated as per the business logic. The data is sent to S3 after the syncing process. S3 will evaluate the data and the format and store it for backup purposes. Whenever we miss a payment, we can just recover the history from the storage bucket. So it helps us manage the features, cost, and regulatory aspects.

I like the S3 Lambda access point and S3 management console which helps with the filtering and returning of data.

Many customers use this tool. We use it for enterprise application data where we store all cloud-native application production data. You can upload any amount of data and access it from anywhere to deploy the applications. However, the tool needs to improve its performance. Clients can reach more end users if the overall process is faster.

The solution can be a perfect tool if it can add more S3 storage classes and manage the authorized users to one bucket and give access to the storage usage and activity trends.

I have been using the solution for the past two years.

The solution’s stability can have a rating of eight out of ten.

I would rate the solution’s scalability a seven out of ten. Scalability depends on the size of the data which can be zero bytes to five TB which is the largest.

I would rate the customer service and support a nine out ten. 

Positive

AWS S3’s setup is not complex, and in fact, manageable. The number of people required for deployment depends on the data. If it is a Single Page Application with single-page data, then one person is enough for the deployment. However, if there are payment files involved, then you need around three to four people in the team to deploy it on the cloud.

There is ROI with the use of the tool. Organizations can benefit from the tool with their business logic.

The tool is not too expensive considering the various pros.

I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. I am not sure about the solution’s version. It should be either four or five. I have practical knowledge of the tool like its implementation. We store data on the S3 bucket and take it to present to the database. The tool is manageable and maintainable by anyone for their work.

This is a perfect tool for data storage. It is good to use S3 as a storage bucket for data.

We use Amazon S3 to store source files. We load the data we ingest from the source system into the solution, which is then consumed on Snowflake.

Amazon S3 is very flexible and provides high storage.

No direct connector is available to connect Amazon S3 with other tools like MicroStrategy. So, I have to use a third party and connect to it.

I have been using Amazon S3 for three years.

Amazon S3 is a stable solution.

Around 50 users from the infrastructure team are using the solution in our organization.

The solution's technical support is pretty good. Although the support team's response time is a little slow, everything else is fine, and they are resolving our issues.

Positive

The solution's initial setup is comparatively difficult because only someone with cloud knowledge can use Amazon S3.

Amazon S3 works on a pay-as-you-go model, and it is worth the money if used to its potential.

The solution is cost-effective because it is based on a pay-as-you-go model, where I can purchase and use it according to my needs.

Our organization chose Amazon S3 because of its scalability, security, and encryption. Since the solution is used for storage, it provides a higher transfer rate to transfer files from one location to another.

Amazon S3 is a good choice for someone with a lot of files and needs a lot of storage with easy computation, scalability, and backups.

Overall, I rate Amazon S3 a nine out of ten.