Buckets, Objects, and Regions
Create S3 buckets, upload objects, understand key naming, and see how S3 replicates data within a Region.
What Is Amazon S3?
Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) is AWS's object storage service designed to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere on the internet. S3 provides 11 nines of durability (99.999999999%) by redundantly storing objects across multiple devices in multiple Availability Zones within the selected Region. It is infinitely scalable, has no capacity limit, and supports objects from 0 bytes up to 5 TB. S3 is the backbone of countless AWS architectures—serving static websites, data lakes, backup repositories, and more.
S3 Buckets: The Top-Level Container
An S3 bucket is a globally unique named container for objects. Buckets are created in a specific AWS Region, but their names must be globally unique across all AWS accounts worldwide (because the name becomes part of the URL). Bucket names must be 3–63 characters, lowercase, start with a letter or number, and contain no underscores or uppercase letters. Best practice: include your account ID or a random suffix to avoid name collisions with other accounts.
# Create an S3 bucket in a specific region
aws s3api create-bucket \
--bucket my-company-data-20240101 \
--region us-west-2 \
--create-bucket-configuration LocationConstraint=us-west-2