Amazon S3
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 scalabilitydata availabilitysecurityand performance. Millions of customers of all sizes and industries storemanageanalyzeand protect any amount of data for virtually any use casesuch as data lakescloud-native applicationsand mobile apps. With cost-effective storage classes and easy-to-use management featuresyou can optimize costsorganize and analyze dataand configure fine-tuned access controls to meet specific business and compliance requirements.
Benefits
You can store virtually any amount of data with S3 all the way to exabytes with unmatched performance. S3 is fully elasticautomatically growing and shrinking as you add and remove data. There’s no need to provision storageand you pay only for what you use.
Amazon S3 provides the most durable storage in the cloud and industry leading availability. Based on its unique architectureS3 is designed to provide 99.999999999% (11 nines) data durability and 99.99% availability by defaultbacked by the strongest SLAs in the cloud.
Protect your data with unmatched securitydata protectioncomplianceand access control capabilities. S3 is secureprivateand encrypted by defaultand also supports numerous auditing capabilities to monitor access requests to your S3 resources.
S3 delivers multiple storage classes with the best price performance for any workload and automated data lifecycle managementso you can store massive amounts of frequentlyinfrequentlyor rarely accessed data in a cost-efficient way. S3 delivers the resiliencyflexibilitylatencyand throughputto ensure storage never limits performance.
Data foundation for AI
S3 became the foundation of modern data lakesenabling any organization to centralize structured and unstructured datarun analyticsand build applications without managing complex infrastructure. S3 Intelligent-Tiering rewrote the economics of storagesaving S3 customers more than $6 billion. S3 didn't just scale with industry shifts—it helped accelerate them.
As AI training and generative AI raised the bar for what storage needed to deliverS3 evolved. S3 Express One Zone is the fastest cloud object storage classS3 Tables deliver native Apache Iceberg supportand S3 Vectors provides native vector storage and query for AI applications.
What began as storage for the internet is now the data foundation the world runs on.
Amazon S3 today
Use cases
Build an open data architecture for analytics and AI
More than 1,000,000 data lakes run on AWS. Whether you’re building a data lake or lakehouse architectureAmazon S3 provides the ideal foundation for petabyte-scale analytics and AI workloads because of its unmatched durabilityavailabilityscalabilitysecurityand price performance. S3 supports open table formats like Apache Icebergallowing you to run queries directly against a singlereliable copy of data using your preferred AWS or third-party analytics engine. For a fully managed experienceS3 Tables automatically handles compactionsnapshot managementand file cleanup of Apache Iceberg tablesreducing the operational burden of managing a data lakehouse and scaling performance as your data volumes grow.
Accelerate performance-critical applications
Building on the scale and durability of Amazon S3the S3 Express One Zone storage class accelerates performance-intensive workloads with consistent single-digit millisecond latency and up to 10x faster data access than the S3 Standard storage class. It’s ideal for high-throughput workloads such as AI training and inferencereal-time analyticsmedia processingand interactive applications. As the fastest cloud object storageS3 Express One Zone delivers faster access to the most frequently accessed datasetimproves compute efficiencyand lowers API request costsreducing the total cost of ownership for the most demanding workloads.
Scale and differentiate generative AI and agentic applications
Build generative AI and agentic applications on Amazon S3the durable and scalable foundation for your data. Access diverse data types at scale—including unstructuredstructuredstreamingand vector data—to trainfine-tuneand customize models or improve contextual understanding through RAG. With direct integrations across AWS analytics and AI/ML servicesS3 accelerates the path from data to intelligence without managing complex infrastructure.
S3 simplifies data pipelinesprotects critical information with security by defaultand delivers cost-efficient scalability so you can support evolving AI workloads. Whether you’re developing domain-specific assistantsintelligent agentsor personalized generative AI experiencesS3 provides the trusted data foundation to buildcustomizeand deploy quickly and efficiently.
Optimize vector stroage and query costs for AI and semantic search
Semantic search enables AI applications to understand the meaning and context of data by using vector embeddings to represent relationships across content such as documentsimagesand videos. Amazon S3 Vectors brings native vector support to S3allowing you to store and query vectors alongside your source data in a fully serverless architecture. By reducing the cost of storing and querying vectors by up to 90% while maintaining subsecond query performanceS3 Vectors makes it cost-effective to create and use large vector datasets to improve the memory and context of AI agents as well as conduct semantic search results of your S3 data. With S3 Vectorsdevelopers can get started quicklyreduce operational complexityand scale vector-driven semantic search and AI workloads efficiently on a durabletrusted foundation.
Back uprestoreand archive data while meeting compliance requirements
Meet your recovery time objective (RTO)recovery point objective (RPO)and compliance requirements with the robust replication functionality of S3data protection with AWS Backupand various AWS Partner Network solutions. For cost-optimizedlong-term data storagearchive data using Amazon S3 Glacier storage classes to lower costseliminate operational complexitiesand gain new insights.
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