Amazon S3
Amazon Web Services' object storage service for storing and serving files at any scale.
HN commenters use S3 as a dependable low-level storage building block123 and as a static-site or media origin behind a CDN,456 valuing features like lifecycle policies, object lock, conditional writes and presigned URLs.78910 The caveats raised are egress costs compared with cheaper alternatives like B2, Wasabi and R2,11 and roughly 200ms PUT latency that only fades when writes are batched.12
Why people recommend it
Static site hosting · 3
Commonly paired with CloudFront or Cloudflare to serve static sites and media cheaply.
“it's served by S3 and CloudFront”
“The equivalent here is more like S3 + Cloudflare (Cloud Connector and some rules). Which is free for most use cases and (IMO) pretty easy.”
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“S3 (I wanted reliable data storage)”
Core storage primitive · 3
Recommended as one of the few low-level AWS services worth using, often alongside a single database.
“Use EC2, EBS, S3, Route53 plus EKS, RDS, ElastiCache.”
“In practice I use one database and object storage (S3).”
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“Probably will integrate S3 before going live”
Developer primitives · 3
Conditional writes, presigned URLs and object versioning enable simple designs without extra services.
“S3 CAS conditional writes changed the game for building coordination primitives on object storage”
“S3 presigned URLs are the boring answer, but they work.”
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“I made an email mailbox using S3 object versioning.”
Lifecycle policies · 2
Lifecycle rules handle easy data-retention and cleanup tasks.
“S3 lifecycle policies and scheduled RDBMS jobs are the low hanging fruit here.”
“S3 lifecycle policies handle the easy stuff”
Object lock · 1
Object lock prevents even super-admin credentials from deleting backups early.
“This is a feature from AWS S3 that even the most privileged account credentials (super admin) can't turn off nor delete the files before the object lock”
Caveats and dissent
Egress and cost · 1
Competitors are priced under S3, and egress fees and lock-in are called the real kicker.
“all priced comfortably under S3 before egress”
Write latency · 1
PUTs take around 200ms, which only stops mattering once writes are batched.
“S3 CAS conditional writes changed the game for building coordination primitives on object storage”
Lifecycle limits · 1
Lifecycle rules cover easy cases, but cross-system cleanup still needs custom scheduled jobs.
“S3 lifecycle policies handle the easy stuff”
Often compared with
Who recommends it in their own words
Threads where it came up
- Ask HN: How are you handling data retention across your stack? 3 mentions
- Jeffgeerling.com has been Migrated to Hugo 2 mentions
- S3 Is the Future, S3 Is the Past 1 mention
- Nvidia announces native GPU programming in Rust 1 mention
- AWS says it can't restore some data from mideast facilities struck by Iran 1 mention
- PostgreSQL for Everything 1 mention
Data: amazon-s3.json. Quotes are verbatim; the verdict and theme labels are written by a model from these comments, and every clause links to its sources.
All comments 19
“all priced comfortably under S3 before egress”
“Got into AWS S3 as a beta user.”
“I use S3 (well GCS mostly) for data that I wouldn’t be upset if it’s lost.”
“Probably will integrate S3 before going live”
“This is a feature from AWS S3 that even the most privileged account credentials (super admin) can't turn off nor delete the files before the object lock”
“In practice I use one database and object storage (S3).”
“S3 (I wanted reliable data storage)”
“Use EC2, EBS, S3, Route53 plus EKS, RDS, ElastiCache.”
“True, we use S3 a lot too.”
“my product stores emails in S3”
“S3 lifecycle policies and scheduled RDBMS jobs are the low hanging fruit here.”
“S3 lifecycle policies handle the easy stuff”
“S3 CAS conditional writes changed the game for building coordination primitives on object storage”
“S3 presigned URLs are the boring answer, but they work.”
“I made an email mailbox using S3 object versioning.”
“it's served by S3 and CloudFront”
“uploaded the result to the S3 bucket that backs my website”
“The equivalent here is more like S3 + Cloudflare (Cloud Connector and some rules). Which is free for most use cases and (IMO) pretty easy.”
“I use S3/Cloudfront today”