Amazon S3 is AWS's object storage service with 11 nines of durability. Pay-as-you-go pricing starts at $0.023/GB-month for S3 Standard.
Amazon S3 is AWS's object storage service, designed to store and retrieve any volume of data with high durability and availability. It scales automatically and requires no infrastructure provisioning, making it a foundational storage layer for a wide range of applications, from data lakes to application backends.
S3 offers 99.999999999% (11 nines) data durability and 99.99% availability. Multiple storage classes address different access patterns and cost needs, including S3 Standard, S3 Express One Zone (single-digit-millisecond latency, up to 10x faster access), and S3 Glacier for archival storage. Newer additions include S3 Tables for native Apache Iceberg support and S3 Vectors for native vector storage used in AI similarity search. Data is encrypted by default with fine-grained access controls and auditing.
S3 is billed on a strict pay-as-you-go basis with no minimum charge. S3 Standard storage starts at $0.023 per GB per month for the first 50TB in the US East (N. Virginia) region, with lower per-GB rates at higher usage tiers, plus separate charges for requests and data transfer. AWS states S3 Intelligent-Tiering has saved customers a combined $6 billion+ by automatically moving data to lower-cost tiers.
S3 Standard storage starts at $0.023 per GB per month for the first 50TB in the US East region, with pricing that varies by storage class, request volume, and data transfer.
S3 is used for data lakes and analytics, AI/ML training and inference data, backup and archival storage, and as storage for cloud-native and mobile applications.
Yes, S3 Vectors adds native vector storage for AI similarity search, and S3 integrates with AWS's broader analytics and AI/ML services.
AWS states S3 provides 99.999999999% (11 nines) data durability and 99.99% availability.