Today Amazon Web Services announced the availability of a new feature of their Simple Storage Service (S3).
Object Versioning now joins the ever growing list of features supported by S3. This proves once again that Amazon Web Services are listening to their customers and putting plenty of distance between them and their competition.
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They Grow Up So Fast
In March 2006 Amazon publicly launched S3, the first of their web services. In doing so, they also unveiled their new Web Services division of their business.
The service will soon celebrate its 4th birthday; at its 3rd birthday over 59 billion objects had already been stored. By anyone’s standard, the service is successful.
Amazon S3 provides storage buckets that allow users to PUT files in and then GET them back later. Simple right?
Taking things beyond the simple GET and PUT might have a lot to do with S3’s success. Amazon has added many features making S3 suitable for many different use cases.
Pick and Mix Features
The different S3 features can be switched on and off for individual buckets allowing users to pick different features depending on what they want to do.
For example:
Backups – buckets can be private and because they are securely hosted by Amazon far away in the cloud, they are an ideal “other place” to store a copy of important files.
File Sharing – access controls can be used to white-list other users to have access to your buckets.
Content Distribution – buckets can be made publically available via HTTP. This makes it perfect for websites to offload the serving of static content such as images. The CloudFront feature takes this one step further and makes your content available to users via their nearest Amazon Internet presence; so a user in Japan or Europe would not have to download your content from servers in the USA.
Versioning
