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Amazon Web Services

Is Amazon S3 Global, Regional, or Zonal? I had a conversation about building resilience to Region failure where this question arose. It is a natural question, especially for people early in their journey to the cloud. S3 is Global. S3 appears as a Global service in the AWS Console and Bucket names must be unique, even across accounts. S3 creates a URL based on the Bucket name and so Bucket names must be unique across accounts and Regions. The deeper truth is that names must be unique across an AWS Partition, but this nuance is not relevant to most people. S3 is Regional. S3’s global nature does not extend to data storage. Individual Buckets are tied to a single Region. The bytes for data stored in the Bucket ultimately resides on AWS-managed servers in multiple Availability Zones all within the same Region. S3 is Zonal. The distribution of data within a Region depends on the type or storage class of Bucket you create. Most storage classes provide Region-level resilience while a few offer lesser durability and availability in exchange for performance or cost, but the details are in the fine print. Infrequent Access One Zone lowers cost by storing data for a specific object in a single Zone, but the service may choose to store data in any of the Zones in the Region. One Zone Express is the newest storage class that pins storage to a specific Zone for higher performance. S3 can be Global by replicating data across Regions. Applications can build cross region resilience using built-in S3 features to replicate data from a source Bucket to a destination Bucket, including destination Buckets in a distant Region. We can use this replication feature as a part of resilience strategy. So, Global, Regional, or Zonal? All of the above. The details matter and AWS lets us choose the storage class that meets our needs.

Global services

Global services

docs.aws.amazon.com

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