If you’re studying for any AWS cert, you’re going to see S3 questions — a lot of them. S3 is where you dump files in the cloud. Amazon calls them “objects” and they live in “buckets,” but really it’s storage you reach over the internet that never runs out of room. AWS guarantees your data won’t disappear, with eleven nines of durability.
The one thing that trips people up
S3 is object storage. It’s not a hard drive you attach to a server (that’s EBS) and not a shared network drive (that’s EFS). Mix those up and you’ll miss easy points.
Storage classes, minus the pain
Standard is for data you use all the time. Standard-IA is cheaper but charges you to pull data back, so use it for data you rarely touch. Glacier and Deep Archive are dirt cheap but slow — think records you’re legally stuck keeping for years and hope to never open.
Test yourself
A company keeps 50 TB of logs. People hammer them for the first month, barely touch them after three, but legal says keep everything seven years. What’s the most cost-effective approach?
- Keep everything in S3 Standard
- A lifecycle rule: Standard → Standard-IA at 30 days → Glacier Deep Archive at 90 days
- Move all logs to Glacier Deep Archive immediately
- Replicate the bucket to a second Region
👉 Click to reveal the answer & explanation
Correct answer: B. A lifecycle rule matches cost to how often you actually reach for the data. Leaving it all in Standard bleeds money (A); dumping it straight into Deep Archive means you can’t read last week’s logs without a long wait (C); replication is about disaster recovery, not cost (D).
Related topics
EBS vs EFS vs S3 · AWS KMS · Amazon EC2
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