Technology

The only thing I don't see mentioned in the explanations that already exist is that S3 is a pay for usage service.

I.E. You don't pay for a tier of storage you pay for the gb of storage used. If your usage increases your cost goes up and if your usage goes down your costs go down. Which makes it very easy to set and forget. No need to worry about keeping your data storage under a certain amount or to remember to switch to a lower tier to save money etc.

Granted that can backfire and result in a surprise bill way more than you were expecting but that is usually not an issue especially for medium to large size businesses.

It's worth noting that a number of other providers now sell S3-compatible storage services that are completely separate from Amazon, but let you interact with them using any of the S3 tools that have sprung up.

https://aws.amazon.com/s3/

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service

Amazon's cloud based Simple Storage Service (hence the S3). It is, in ELI5 terms, a file storage service like Microsoft's OneDrive or Apple's iCloud. A bit like a harddrive reached over the internet. You transfer files to and from it.

That's grossly oversimplifying of course. S3 has some important technical differences to a straight up "cloud drive". And it comes with a mind boggling array of options so it can be customised to be the storage of all sorts of very large real world applications and websites.

As part of AWS? S3 stands for "simple storage solution" and it is used for storing data in the cloud. A typical s3 setup has a "bucket" which would act like a folder directory on your computer. At that point it can be pretty much however you want to set it up. In theory it can store anything, as long as it can be converted into a binary string, I believe. I havent worked in AWS in a few years, but I recall it being easy enough to use for storing files when handling file transfers with other microservices like Lambdas. You just need to configure a few things, like the bucket name, the "file name" (I say it that way, because you dont necessarily have to store files - and anything stored in s3 has to be converted to that binary string), and the

It can be even more than just simple storage when used with other microservices, the possibilities can be endless

It's a storage agnostic protocol for sending, receiving and enumerating to/from cloud storage. Think off it like email. Email service providers allow for a number of ways to access your email, be it pop3, IMAP or web. The underlying technology is abstracted away. In the same way cloud storage allows for web, s3 and/or WebDAV. Amongst others. And likewise the back end is abstracted away. The s3 client you use doesn't need to know how the data is actually stored. And there's some pretty whacky storage back ends.

One of Amazon Web Service's service that stores data. It works in combination with a few other of their services.