Amazon S3

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is the basic, massively scalable, and highly available object storage solution offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS). It is intended to store and retrieve any amount of data, of any type, from anywhere on the internet, with the same extremely dependable and cost-effective infrastructure that Amazon employs to run its own worldwide network. S3 is not just simple file storage; it's a vital component for modern cloud-native apps and data architectures, centralizing data in globally accessible containers called buckets.

The key architectural distinction is that S3 stores data as objects (the data file and its accompanying metadata) rather than in a typical file system hierarchy. This object architecture enables almost limitless scalability and is the foundation for S3's industry-leading durability of 99.999999999% (eleven nines), which is achieved by automatically replicating data across many devices and geographically distinct Availability Zones within a region.