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Getting Started with AWS S3

Welcome to AWS S3​

Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is object storage built for durability, availability, and scale. You can store anything — images, videos, backups, logs, frontend builds — and retrieve them from anywhere in the world.

S3 stores trillions of objects and routinely handles millions of requests per second. It's one of AWS's oldest and most battle-tested services.

Why S3?​

Serving files from your EC2 server works, but it has limits — disk space is finite, and every file request consumes your server's bandwidth. S3 offloads this entirely, giving you essentially unlimited storage with pay-as-you-go pricing.

Key benefits:

  • Durability — 99.999999999% (11 nines) designed durability
  • Scalability — no storage limits; grows with your needs
  • CDN-ready — pairs with CloudFront for global low-latency delivery
  • Flexible access control — public, private, signed URLs, or IAM policies
  • Static website hosting — serve a React/Next.js build directly from S3

Common Use Cases​

  • File uploads — store user-uploaded images, documents, and videos
  • Static site hosting — deploy frontend builds without a server
  • Backup & archiving — store database dumps, logs, and snapshots
  • Data lake — store raw data for analytics pipelines
  • App assets — serve CSS, JS, fonts via CloudFront CDN

What You'll Learn​

  • Buckets & objects — the core S3 data model
  • Access control — public access, bucket policies, and pre-signed URLs
  • Static website hosting — enabling and configuring it on a bucket
  • CloudFront integration — setting up a CDN in front of S3
  • Uploading from code — using the AWS SDK to upload files programmatically
  • Storage classes — Standard, Infrequent Access, Glacier for cost optimization

Prerequisites​

  • An AWS account
  • Basic understanding of HTTP and URLs
  • Familiarity with JSON (for bucket policies)