What is Amazon S3?

Amazon Simple Storage Service, widely known as Amazon S3, is a highly scalable, fast, and durable solution for object-level storage of any data type. Unlike the operating systems we are all used to, Amazon S3 does not store files in a file system, instead it stores files as objects. Object Storage allows users to upload files, videos, and documents like you were to upload files, videos, and documents to popular cloud storage products like Dropbox and Google Drive. This makes Amazon S3 very flexible and platform agnostic.

Objects also hold and store metadata which we will cover in detail later.

What is the difference between Amazon S3 and EC2?

To someone who’s never used AWS services, trying to understand their various products may be difficult the first time around. Between S3, EC2, RDS, VPC, and EKS, going through Amazon’s catalog of services can seem like alphabet soup.

In order to start putting the pieces of the AWS puzzle together, it’s important to understand the basic core services that AWS offers. Today we’ll cover EC2 with S3 and the different storage classes of S3.

Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3 are different enough that the average person should be able to draw the distinction without much difficulty.