What is AWS S3?

4 min readJul 28, 2020

AWS S3 (Amazon Simple Storage) is Cloud Storage or Object Storage. That is created to store objects of any data, it can analyze the data, and access this data from anywhere, whether collecting websites, mobile apps, or other data.

The AWS S3 has the durability of 99.999999999%. This product has been used with over 1,000,000 applications in industries. Also, it can integrate with third-parties and other services in AWS. Such as domain name creation by connecting to AWS route53 or extending globally to CloudFront. you only pay according to use.

AWS has a compute service named EC2 (short for Elastic Compute Cloud) and many data storage options. Depending on the type of use, S3 is one of them. Its function is to store object-oriented data or to store objects in pieces. Comparable to storing files (As for database storage, there are other services like Amazon RDS or DynamoDB, etc)

Use Cases

Backup & Recovery

As mentioned above, the AWS S3 is highly Durable and very secure for storing your important information.

Data lakes & Big data analytics

You can store data that can be created or unstructured. No matter what type of data you collect, whether financial,or in pharmacies, images, photos, videos, the AWS S3 can be used as Data to do data analytics

What is Bucket?

In order to use S3, it is necessary to first create a “bucket” for data collection. The brief description of the bucket is comparable to the outermost folder. So we can classify the data in an orderly way And do not interfere with unrelated information (such as using different projects)

The limitation of the bucket is that each bucket must have its own unique name. And cannot be duplicated on all S3 systems. Each user can name the bucket anything. (It’s just not the same as the existing bucket). The name of the bucket you set will become part of a URL you can access. For example: https://paradaalice.s3.amazonaws.com

Once the bucket is created, users can store data (S3, called an object) into the bucket as needed.

Who can access information in the Bucket?

Normally? Once a bucket is created in the AWS system, all access rights to that bucket will be set to “private” in the first place, meaning only the bucket owner can access the data.

Then the bucket owner may later grant access rights to others (such as colleagues, customers) later via tools called policies and access control lists (ACLs).

In security terms, the information in the bucket should be restricted to those who are authorized. But we can also set the bucket to be “everyone” accessible without needing to log in. Also known as a public bucket, which is suitable for information already intended to be public, such as website information or documents for public distribution.

AWS has a policy for S3 users to be aware of which data in the bucket is open to the public (whether intentionally or unintentionally) via the management tools in the S3 system, as in the picture (orange or clearly visible).

However, even if the user accidentally opened the S3 Bucket as a public, if the bucket name or URL is not known, the data in that bucket is still not accessible. For this reason there are so many hackers. Find a way to scan the name of the bucket in the AWS system “in case” it will find a public bucket and can retrieve the data without wasting time hacking into the system.