Amazon S3

Agenda

• What is Amazon S3?

• Functions & concepts of S3

• Advantages and disadvantages

• Requirements

• Pricing

• Implementation

What is Amazon S3?

• S3 stands for Simple Storage Service.

• It is storage for the Internet.

• Provided via a web services interface.(REST and SOAP)

• Based on the same infrastructure Amazon uses for its global network of web sites.

Functions & concepts of S3• Allows unlimited storage of objects(files)

containing of 1 byte to 5 gigabytes each.• Objects consist of the raw object data and

metadata.• Objects are stored and retrieved using a

developer-assigned key.• Data are kept secured from unauthorised access

through authentication mechanism.• Objects can be made available to public by the

http or bittorrent protocol.

Functions & concepts of S3• All objects are stored in buckets.• A bucket is simply a container for objects.It is

used to partition the namespace of objects at the highest level.

• Buckets are similar to Internet domain names. They are accessed via bucketname.s3.amazonaws.com.

• Each developer account has a limit of 100 buckets.

• More information of buckets can be found at: http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonS3/2006-03-01/index.html?UsingBucket.html

Functions & concepts of S3• A key is the unique identifier for an object within

a bucket. • A bucket and a key together uniquely identify

each object in S3.Every object can be addressed through bucket and key combination.

• For example, if your bucket name is mybucket and key is myhomepage.html, the URL for the object will be http://mybucket.s3.amazonaws.com/myhomepage.html

Advantages of using S3• Scalability.The amount of storage & bandwidth

you need can scale as you like without any configuration changes needed.

• Availability, speed, throughput, capacity, and robustness is not affected even if you gain 10,000 users overnight.

• Unlimited storage. You pay as you go. • Inexpensive and no capital outlay. Great for

startups! • Data is accessible from any location. • Since it is based on the Amazon infrastructure, it

is probably more reliable than other cheap data storage providers.

Disadvtanges of using S3• Not user-friendly for 'beginner level' computer

users. S3 is basically UI-less.• Trust. Not all types of business or services might

be comfortable with storing their data in the 'cloud', especially those with extremely sensitive and confidential data. Eg. banking

• Although it promises 99.9% of uptime in its SLA, in 2008 it has 2 major outages in February and July, bringing down Web 2.0 startups like Twitter.

• Back in 2007, S3 had speed issues with reading and writing of data.

Requirements• To get started using S3, an AWS account is

needed. An AWS account is simply an Amazon.com account that has AWS services enabled.

• Sign up at http://aws.amazon.com• After creating the AWS account, you need to

sign up for S3 by clicking the sign up for this web service button at this page.

• A credit card needs to be associated with the account.

• You will be given a Access Key ID and secret Access Key on successful creation.(note: they are not emailed to you.)

Pricing• Charges for using S3 is based on the location of

your buckets.• You are billed according to storage(average),

data transfer in and out and the number of requests per month.

• There is no minimum fee to use S3, you pay for only what you use.

• You can view your current charges incurred almost immediately on the S3 portal.

• Detailed usage reports can also be downloaded in xml or csv format.

Pricing – US usageStorage$0.150 per GB – first 50 TB / month of storage used $0.140 per GB – next 50 TB / month of storage used $0.130 per GB – next 400 TB /month of storage used $0.120 per GB – storage used / month over 500 TB Data Transfer$0.100 per GB – all data transfer in $0.170 per GB – first 10 TB / month data transfer out

$0.130 per GB – next 40 TB / month data transfer out

$0.110 per GB – next 100 TB / month data transfer out

$0.100 per GB – data transfer out / month over 150 TB Requests$0.01 per 1,000 PUT, COPY, POST, or LIST requests

$0.01 per 10,000 GET and all other requests* * No charge for delete requests

Pricing – EU usageStorage$0.180 per GB – first 50 TB / month of storage used $0.170 per GB – next 50 TB / month of storage used $0.160 per GB – next 400 TB / month of storage used $0.150 per GB – storage used / month over 500 TB Data Transfer$0.100 per GB – all data transfer in $0.170 per GB – first 10 TB / month data transfer out

$0.130 per GB – next 40 TB / month data transfer out

$0.110 per GB – next 100 TB / month data transfer out

$0.100 per GB – data transfer out / month over 150 TB Requests$0.012 per 1,000 PUT, COPY, POST, or LIST requests

$0.012 per 10,000 GET and all other requests* * No charge for delete requests

Estimate your monthly bills by using this calculator.

Implementation• To start using S3, get hold of your S3 access key

ID and secret access key via the AWS portal.• Next, get hold of an application capable of

managing S3. Here are a few resources:Spaceblock: Windows ApplicationS3 Web Interface: Web App/InterfaceS3 Firefox Organizer: Firefox add-on

• These applications make objects more manageable because they provide a directory structure similar to windows explorer.

Implementation• What can we use S3 for?

- HTML microsites- Flash microsites - Media storage- Backups

• For HTML and Flash microsites, custom URLs can be created by using CNAME to create DNS alias.

• No server side processing should be used in S3 as they will not work without web servers(i.e IIS , Apache)

Amazon EC2• EC2 stands for Elastic Compute Cloud.• Think of it as your CPU/OS, while S3 is your

harddisk.• It provides a web server computing environment,

allowing you to create an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) containing your applications, libraries, data and associated configuration settings.

• Currently capable of running LINUX instances (php,ruby,python comes to mind) , Solaris and Microsoft Windows Server 2003.

• Designed to be very scalable like S3.

Amazon SimpleDB• Amazon SimpleDB provides a simple web

services interface to create and store multiple data sets, query your data easily, and return the results.

• It is not a traditional RDBMS, therefore there is no schema needed.

• Therefore, it is actually very flexible(compared to RDBMS) and is something worth looking into.

• Very useful if you need to store simple structured data, e.g. Lucky draw participants data.

• Again, it is designed to be very scalable.