With Requester Pays enabled on a bucket, the person downloading the data — not the bucket owner — pays the request and transfer costs. It’s used for sharing large datasets without footing everyone’s bandwidth bill.
The tell
When an organization wants to share large datasets publicly or with partners but not pay for others’ downloads, that’s Requester Pays. The requester must be authenticated (so AWS can bill them). Common for open data and shared research datasets.
Test yourself
A research organization shares a huge public dataset in S3 but doesn’t want to pay the data-transfer costs when others download it. What should they enable?
- A public read bucket policy
- S3 Requester Pays
- S3 Transfer Acceleration
- Cross-Region Replication
👉 Click to reveal the answer & explanation
Correct answer: B. Requester Pays shifts request and transfer costs to the downloader, letting the owner share large datasets without paying others’ bandwidth. A public policy (A) leaves the owner paying transfer; Transfer Acceleration (C) and replication (D) don’t shift billing.
Related topics
Amazon S3 · S3 storage classes · Data Lake vs Data Warehouse
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