Fundamentals
Fundamentals
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    AWS S3

    ​​ AWS Athena

    Data files in S3 can be parsed by AWS Athena.

    ​​ Mount as file system

    An S3 Bucket could be mounted as a file system in a Container for example. A good use case would be multiple web services that should use the same configuration. The mount point should not be used to write, because the throughput for writing is extremely slow. I’m not even sure if the mount point is writable at all. I believe S3 can be mounted in Linux, but S3 cannot be mounted in Windows.

    ​​ Storage Classes

    AWS S3 has a number of Storage Classes where one can improve Cost at the cost of how fast data can be retrieved.

    ​​ Versioning

    S3 Buckets can be created with and without Versioning enabled. If Versioning is enabled, it is possible to retrieve previous versions of the objects that are stored in the S3 Bucket, or deleted from the S3 Bucket. If Versioning is enabled, deleted objects won’t actually get deleted, but they get a Delete Marker.

    ​​ Replication

    An S3 bucket lives in one Region only. If that Region is destroyed, then so is its data. In order to mitigate that one could set up Asynchronous Cross Region Replication. For that Versioning must be enabled in both the source and destination.

    After enabling it, only new files are Replicated. You can optionally set the option to replicate Delete Markers, which will basically delete files that are deleted from the first bucket to be deleted from the second one as well.

    If you also want to replicate existing objects or objects that failed to replicate, there is S3 Batch Replication.

    Replication does not support chaining. I.e.: if bucket 1 replicates to bucket 2, and 2 replicates to 3, a file that is added to 1 will be added to 2, but it will not be added to 3.

    ​​ Durability

    AWS S3 has a very high Durability of 11 Nines. This comes down to that if you store 1,000,000 objects you could lose 1 every 100,000 years. This is the same for all Storage Classes.

    ​​ Availability

    AWS S3 is available 99.99% of the time (4 Nines), which means it could be unavailable up to 53 minutes per year.