Amazon S3 Metadata: Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) is a highly scalable, fast, and cost-effective solution for businesses looking to store and serve up large amounts of data. But what makes S3 so special? It’s because of the metadata that comes with each object stored in an S3 bucket. Get this article as a user guide to understand all about Amazon S3 metadata. If you are new to using Amazon Web Services or have just begun using Amazon S3 to store your data, you might not be aware of the benefits inherent in S3 that are not available from other storage services.
Even if you’ve used AWS before, there are probably some things you can learn about using S3 as opposed to other services. And if you’re reading this as an experienced user of AWS, there may be details here that you didn’t know about or didn’t fully understand. Regardless of your level of experience with AWS services like S3, it will make reading this article worthwhile and help get you on the right track when working with these services again in the future. Let’s dive in!
S3 Buckets and Objects
If you’re new to Amazon S3, you should know that S3 actually refers to a “bucket” of data stored on a cloud server. When you store data in the cloud, you store it in buckets. The bucket is like a folder that contains the data. You can store as many buckets as you want, and you can store data in each bucket. All of your S3 data is stored in an S3 bucket.
You can name the bucket whatever you want and you can store a variety of different types of data in it. When you store data in an S3 bucket, Amazon actually stores two versions of that data in the bucket. The first version is the data that you actually store in the bucket (also referred to as the “live” data). The second version is what is called the “object metadata.” Let’s talk about what object metadata is.
Object Versions
Object metadata is the version of data that Amazon stores along with the live data you store in S3. Object metadata is essentially a copy of the information that is associated with the data you store in S3. Object metadata includes data such as the date that the data was last modified, the date that the data was uploaded to S3, what bucket the data is stored in, the size of the data, and more.
All of this metadata allows you to effectively manage the data that is stored in S3. Using the metadata, you can search for specific data, track which users are accessing specific data, and even track the changes that have been made to the data. The metadata that is stored with your S3 data is useful for a number of different things.
Storing Data in S3
Let’s say that you’re a blogger and you want to store your posts in S3 buckets. You probably want to be able to name your posts and organize them in a way that makes sense to you. With S3, you can do this. You can name each post and put it in a folder (which is actually a S3 bucket). You can also give each post a “read” or “write” permission. If you give a post a “read” permission, you can view the data in that post. If you give a post a “write” permission, you can edit the data in that post.
Deleting Objects in S3
You can also delete objects in S3. Let’s say that you’re a blogger and you’re done with a blog post (and you’d like to delete it and permanently remove it from your blog). You can delete the post and S3 will permanently delete the data in that post. You can also delete an entire S3 bucket. It’s important to note that when you delete an S3 bucket, Amazon will permanently delete all of the data that was stored in that bucket. You cannot retrieve deleted data from S3. But deleted data does remain in your S3 bucket. You can use an S3 bucket inventory report to see all of the data in your bucket.
Standard Storage and Reduced Redundancy Storage (RRS)
Let’s say that you’re building a website and you’re hosting it with Amazon Web Services. You might choose to store your website’s data in S3 buckets. One of the things you’ll have to decide is what level of redundancy to use for your buckets. Data redundancy refers to the number of copies of data that is stored in a bucket. Standard storage means that your data is stored once in an Amazon S3 bucket. When you store data in S3, Amazon stores the data twice in the bucket (once as the live data and once as the object metadata).
In order to store the data twice, Amazon has to write the data to two separate nodes. Therefore, standard storage takes two times longer to write data to S3. This means that it takes two times as long to create a website on AWS if you’re using standard storage. If you’re hosting sensitive data, you may want to consider using reduced redundancy storage (RRS).
How Much Does S3 Cost? If you’re hosting data on AWS, you’ll probably use S3 to store that data. When you use S3 to store data, you are charged a monthly fee based on the amount of data that you store in S3 buckets. That means that the more data that you store in S3, the more money Amazon will bill you. The fees that Amazon charges for S3 are tiered.
The more data that you store, the more you’ll pay per month. If you store less than 20 GB, you’ll pay $0.01 per GB. If you store between 20 GB and 1,000 GB, you’ll pay $0.02 per GB. And if you store over 1,000 GB, you’ll pay $0.03 per GB.
Summary
Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) is a highly scalable, fast, and cost-effective solution for businesses looking to store and serve up large amounts of data. But what makes S3 so special? It’s because of the metadata that comes with each object stored in an S3 bucket. All of your S3 data is stored in an S3 bucket.
You can name the bucket whatever you want and you can store a variety of different types of data in it. When you store data in an S3 bucket, Amazon actually stores two versions of that data in the bucket. The first version is the data that you actually store in the bucket (also referred to as the “live” data). The second version is what is called the “object metadata”.
Object metadata is the version of data that Amazon stores along with the live data you store in S3. Object metadata includes data such as the date that the data was last modified, the date that the data was uploaded to S3, what bucket the data is stored in, the size of the data, and more.
All of this metadata allows you to effectively manage the data that is stored in S3. Using the metadata, you can search for specific data, track which users are accessing specific data, and even track the changes that have been made to the data. The metadata that is stored with your S3 data is useful for a number of different things.
When you store data in S3, you can name the buckets whatever you want and you can store a variety of different types of data in them. You can also give each post a “read” or “write” permission. When you delete an S3 bucket, Amazon will permanently delete all of the data that was stored in that bucket. You cannot retrieve deleted data from S3. However, deleted data does remain in your S3 bucket.
You can use an S3 bucket inventory report to see all of the data in your bucket. When you store data in S3, you can choose to use standard storage or reduced redundancy storage (RRS). The more data that you store, the more you’ll pay per month. If you store less than 20 GB, you’ll pay $0.01 per GB. If you store between 20 GB and 1,000 GB, you’ll pay $0.02 per GB.