Simple Storage Service

Similar to EC2, Simple Storage Service (S3) has had its own share of new features and support added to it. Some of these are explained here:

• S3 Object Tagging: S3 Object Tagging is like any other tagging mechanism provided by AWS, used commonly for managing and controlling access to your S3 resources. The tags are simple key-value pairs that you can use for creating and associating IAM policies for your S3 resources, to set up S3 life cycle policies, and to manage transitions of objects between various storage classes.
• S3 Inventory: S3 Inventory was a special feature provided with the sole purpose of cataloging the various objects and providing that as a useable CSV file for further analysis and inventorying. Using S3 Inventory, you can now extract a list of all objects present in your bucket, along with its metadata, on a daily or weekly basis.
• S3 Analytics: A lot of work and effort has been put into S3 so that it is not only used just as another infinitely scalable storage. S3 Analytics provides end users with a medium for analyzing storage access patterns and defines the right set of storage class based on these analytical results. You can enable this feature by simply setting a storage class analysis policy, either on an object, prefix, or the entire bucket as well. Once enabled, the policy monitors the storage access patterns and provides daily visualizations of your storage usage in the AWS Management Console. You can even export these results to an S3 bucket for analyzing them using other business intelligence tools of your choice, such as Amazon QuickSight.
• S3 CloudWatch metrics: It has been a long time coming, but it is finally here! You can now leverage 13 new CloudWatch metrics specifically designed to work with your S3 buckets objects. You can receive one minute CloudWatch metrics, set CloudWatch alarms, and access CloudWatch dashboards to view real-time operations and the performance of your S3 resources, such as total bytes downloaded, number of 4xx HTTP response counts, and so on.
• Brand new dashboard: Although the dashboards and structures of the AWS Management Console change from time to time, it is the new S3 dashboard that I'm really fond of. The object tagging and the storage analysis policy features are all now provided using the new S3 dashboard, along with other impressive and long-awaited features, such as searching for buckets using keywords and the ability to copy bucket properties from an existing bucket while creating new buckets, as depicted in the following screenshot:

• Amazon S3 transfer acceleration: This feature allows you to move large workloads across geographies into S3 at really fast speeds. It leverages Amazon CloudFront endpoints in conjunction with S3 to enable up to 300 times faster data uploads without having to worry about any firewall rules or upfront fees to pay.