Programming Amazon Web Services

Buckets

An S3 bucket is a container for data objects. A bucket does not contain any data; it is little more than a convenient way of grouping objects together. The closest computer system analogy to an S3 bucket would be a disk drive.

The access control permissions for each bucket can be configured to determine who can view the bucket’s contents, or add and remove objects in the bucket. Buckets are also used as the basis for the simple access-logging capabilities provided by S3.

Bucket Locations

You can configure your buckets to be based in different geographical locations. At the time this book was written, Amazon provided S3 data centers in two locations: the United States and Europe. When a bucket is based in a location, all the objects created inside that bucket are automatically stored in that location. Making your S3 resources available from a specific location can improve the performance of S3 for customers living in that region.

The storage and request fees for using S3 vary, depending on the location where your objects are stored (refer back to the Pricing” section). Buckets are created in the U.S. location by default, so unless you choose otherwise, you will be charged the cheapest usage rates available.

To work most efficiently over multiple locations, S3 uses alternative DNS names and request redirection techniques to ensure that service requests are sent to data centers in the region where the bucket is stored.

The use of alternative DNS names means that S3 clients must ...