Welcome to this video on Amazon simple storage service or S3. From the name you've probably guessed that it is a storage service and it's well simple. Most businesses have data that needs to be stored somewhere for the coffee shop. This could be receipts, images, excel spreadsheets, employee training videos, and even text files among others. Storing these files is where S3 comes in handy. Because it is a data store that allows you to store and retrieve an unlimited amount of data at any scale. Data is stored as objects, but instead of storing them in a file directory, you store them in what we call buckets. Think of a file sitting on your hard drive. That is an object and think of a file directory. That is the bucket. The maximum object size that you can upload is 5 TB. You can also version objects to protect them from accidental deletion of an object. What this means is that you always retain the previous versions of an object as like a paper trail. You can even create multiple buckets and store them across different classes or tiers of data. You can then create permissions to limit who can see or even access objects, and you can even stage data between different tiers. These tiers offer mechanisms for different storage use cases, such as data that needs to be accessed frequently versus audit data that needs to be retained for several years. Let's go through the notable one, shall we? The first tier is called S3 standard and comes with 11 nines of durability. That means an object stored in s3 standard has a 99.99999999% that's a lot of nine probability that it will remain intact, after a period of one year. That's pretty high. Furthermore, data is stored in such a way that AWS can sustain the concurrent loss of data in two separate storage facilities. This is because data is stored in at least three facilities, so multiple copies reside across locations. Another useful way to use S3 is static website hosting, where a static website is a collection of HTML files. And each file is akin to a physical page of the actual site. You can do this by simply uploading all your HTML, static web assets and so forth into a bucket and then checking a box to host it as a static website. You can then enter the buckets URL and bam, instant website. And we say static but that doesn't mean you can't have animations and moving parts to your website. Pretty awesome way to start up that coffee blog. The next storage class is called S3 infrequent access or S3 IA, which is used for data that is access less frequently, but requires rapid access when needed. This means it's a perfect place to store backups, disaster recovery files, or any object that requires a long term storage. Another storage class or tear lends itself to that example we had earlier about audit data. Say we need to retain data for several years for auditing purposes, and we don't need it to be retrieved very rapidly. Well, then you can use Amazon S3 glacier to archive that data, to use glacier. You can simply move data to it, or you can create faults and then populate them with archives. And if you have compliance requirements around retaining data for a certain period of time, you can employ an S3 Glacier vault lock policy and lock your vault. You can specify controls such as write once, read many or WORM in a vault lock policy and lock the policy from future edits. Once locked, the policy can no longer be changed. You also have three options for retrieval which range from minutes to hours. And you have the option of uploading directly to glacier or using S3 life cycle policies. Fact, I don't think we mentioned life cycle policies up to this point. But they are policies you can create that can move data automatically between tiers. For example, say we need to keep an object in S3 standard for 90 days, and then we want to move it to S3, i.e for the next 30 days. Then after 120 days total, we want it to be moved to S3 Glacier. With lifecycle policies you create that configuration without changing your application code and it will perform those moves for you automatically. It's another example of a managed AWS service helping take that burden off you so you can focus on more of your business needs. Just to note that there are other storage classes like S3 infrequent access one zone and S3 glacier deep archive that you can use, happy story.
