Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) was one of the first cloud storage services launched by Amazon back in 2006. Offering highly durable and always available storage, S3 allows you to easily store objects of any size on Amazon’s cloud. In addition to object storage, AWS also offers file or block storage along with many other services to support small companies and enterprises alike in offloading their data to the cloud. Amazon’s massive outage in the US-EAST-1 region in 2017, which affected more than 150,000 websites, demonstrates just how critical S3 is to the well-being of the internet.
In this comprehensive guide, I cover the basics of cloud storage and compare the most popular cloud storage services from the three major public cloud providers (AWS, Azure, and GCP) to help you determine which is right for you. Here, I discuss Amazon Web Services (AWS). While Amazon was the first to introduce object, block, and file storage in the cloud, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) both have some tricks up their sleeves, despite being late to the cloud game. This includes features not currently supported by AWS.