AWS S3(Simple Storage Service)

 AWS S3(Simple Storage Service)

When you sign up for AWS, your AWS account is automatically signed up for all services in AWS, including Amazon S3. You are charged only for the services that you use. With Amazon S3, you pay only for what you use.

How Amazon S3 works: Amazon S3 is an object storage service that stores data as objects within buckets. An object is a file and any metadata that describes the file. A bucket is a container for objects. To store your data in Amazon S3, you first create a bucket and specify a bucket name and AWS Region. Then, you upload your data to that bucket as objects in Amazon S3. Each object has a key (or key name), which is the unique identifier for the object within the bucket.

Bucket + Region + Objects(key for each object plus version id, if versioning is enabled on the bucket.)

S3 Versioning to keep multiple versions of an object in the same bucket, which allows you to restore objects that are accidentally deleted or overwritten. you enable versioning on a bucket for the first time, it might take a short amount of time for the change to be fully propagated. We recommend that you wait for 15 minutes after enabling versioning before issuing write operations (PUT or DELETE requests) on objects in the bucket.

Objects Access: Buckets and the objects in them are private and can be accessed only if you explicitly grant access permissions. You can use bucket policies, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies, access control lists (ACLs), and S3 Access Points to manage access.

Bucket: A bucket is a container for objects stored in Amazon S3. You can store any number of objects in a bucket and can have up to 100 buckets in your account.

Addressing Object: Every object in Amazon S3 can be uniquely addressed through the combination of the web service endpoint, bucket name, key, and optionally, a version. For example, if the object named photos/puppy.jpg is stored in the DOC-EXAMPLE-BUCKET bucket in the US West (Oregon) Region, then it is addressable using the URL https://DOC-EXAMPLE-BUCKET.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/photos/puppy.jpg.

Syntax: https://bucket-name.region-name./object-name

Bucket naming rules: The bucket name must:

• Be unique across all of Amazon S3.

• Be between 3 and 63 characters long.

• Not contain uppercase characters.

• Start with a lowercase letter or number.

NOTE: After you create the bucket, you cannot change its name.

Objects: Objects are the fundamental entities stored in Amazon S3. Objects consist of object data and metadata. The metadata is a set of name-value pairs that describe the object. These pairs include some default metadata, such as the date last modified, and standard HTTP metadata, such as Content-Type. You can also specify custom metadata at the time that the object is stored.

S3 Access Points: Amazon S3 Access Points are named network endpoints with dedicated access policies that describe how data can be accessed using that endpoint. Access Points are attached to buckets.

Access control lists (ACLs): You can use ACLs to grant read and write permissions to authorized users for individual buckets and objects. Each bucket and object has an ACL attached to it as a subresource. The ACL defines which AWS accounts or groups are granted access and the type of access.

Regions: You can choose the geographical AWS Region where Amazon S3 stores the buckets that you create. You might choose a Region to optimize latency, minimize costs, or address regulatory requirements. Objects stored in an AWS Region never leave the Region unless you explicitly transfer or replicate them to another Region. For example, objects stored in the Europe (Ireland) Region never leave it.

Accessing Amazon S3: There are 3 main approaches to access Amazon S3. They are as follows:

1. AWS Management Console: The console is a web-based user interface for managing Amazon S3 and AWS resources. If you've signed up for an AWS account, you can access the Amazon S3 console by signing into the AWS Management Console and choosing S3 from the AWS Management Console home page.

2. AWS Command Line Interface: You can use the AWS command line tools to issue commands or build scripts at your system's command line to perform AWS (including S3) tasks.

3. AWS SDKs: AWS provides SDKs (software development kits) that consist of libraries and sample code for various programming languages and platforms (Java, Python, Ruby, .NET, iOS, Android, and so on). The AWS SDKs provide a convenient way to create programmatic access to S3 and AWS. Amazon S3 is a REST service. You can send requests to Amazon S3 using the AWS SDK libraries. which wrap the underlying Amazon S3 REST API and simplify your programming tasks. For example, the SDKs take care of tasks such as calculating signatures, cryptographically signing requests, managing errors, and retrying requests automatically. You can use the AWS SDKs when developing applications with Amazon S3. The AWS SDKs simplify your programming tasks by wrapping the underlying REST API. The AWS Mobile SDKs and the Amplify JavaScript library are also available for building connected mobile and web applications using AWS. In addition to the AWS SDKs, AWS Explorers are available for Visual Studio and Eclipse for Java IDE. In this case, the SDKs and the explorers are bundled together as AWS Toolkits.

4. Amazon S3 REST API: The architecture of Amazon S3 is designed to be programming language-neutral, using AWS-supported interfaces to store and retrieve objects. You can access S3 and AWS programmatically by using the Amazon S3 REST API. The REST API is an HTTP interface to Amazon S3. With the REST API, you use standard HTTP requests to create, fetch, and delete buckets and objects.

In nutshell, Amazon S3 is a REST service. You can send requests to Amazon S3 using the REST API or the AWS SDK libraries, which wrap the underlying Amazon S3 REST API, simplifying your programming tasks. You can also use the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) to make Amazon S3 API calls.

Q. Write all the steps to create a bucket?

Answer: Follow the steps as given below.

General configuration: Bucket name + AWS Region + 

Object Ownership: ACLs disabled (recommended) or ACLs enabled

ACLs disabled: All objects in this bucket are owned by this account. Access to this bucket and its objects is specified using only policies. Then Bucket owner enforced.

ACLs enabled: Objects in this bucket can be owned by other AWS accounts. Access to this bucket and its objects can be specified using ACLs. Then we have two options:- Bucket owner preferred: If new objects written to this bucket specify the bucket-owner-full-control canned ACL, they are owned by the bucket owner. Otherwise, they are owned by the object writer.

Object writer: The object writer remains the object owner.

Next, Block Public Access settings for this bucket:

Public access is granted to buckets and objects through access control lists (ACLs), bucket policies, access point policies, or all. In order to ensure that public access to this bucket and its objects is blocked, turn on Block all public access. These settings apply only to this bucket and its access points. AWS recommends that you turn on Block all public access, but before applying any of these settings, ensure that your applications will work correctly without public access. If you require some level of public access to this bucket or objects within, you can customize the individual settings below to suit your specific storage use cases.

Block all public access:

Turning this setting on is the same as turning on all four settings below. Each of the following settings are independent of one another.

Block public access to buckets and objects granted through new access control lists (ACLs)

S3 will block public access permissions applied to newly added buckets or objects, and prevent the creation of new public access ACLs for existing buckets and objects. This setting doesn’t change any existing permissions that allow public access to S3 resources using ACLs.

Block public access to buckets and objects granted through any access control lists (ACLs)

S3 will ignore all ACLs that grant public access to buckets and objects.

Block public access to buckets and objects granted through new public bucket or access point policies

S3 will block new bucket and access point policies that grant public access to buckets and objects. This setting doesn't change any existing policies that allow public access to S3 resources.

Block public and cross-account access to buckets and objects through any public bucket or access point policies

S3 will ignore public and cross-account access for buckets or access points with policies that grant public access to buckets and objects.

IMPORTANT: Turning off block all public access might result in this bucket and the objects within becoming public

AWS recommends that you turn on block all public access, unless public access is required for specific and verified use cases such as static website hosting.

Next, Bucket Versioning: either enable or disable.

Versioning is a means of keeping multiple variants of an object in the same bucket. You can use versioning to preserve, retrieve, and restore every version of every object stored in your Amazon S3 bucket. With versioning, you can easily recover from both unintended user actions and application failures.

Next, Default encryption: either enable or disable.

Automatically encrypt new objects stored in this bucket

Next, Advanced settings, Object Lock: either enable or disable.

Store objects using a write-once-read-many (WORM) model to help you prevent objects from being deleted or overwritten for a fixed amount of time or indefinitely.

After creating the bucket you can upload files and folders to the bucket, and configure additional bucket settings.

Q. What if ACL is disabled for bucket?

Answer: If ACLs are disabled then the bucket owner automatically owns and has full control over every object in the bucket.

Q. What if ACL is enabled for bucket?

Answer: If ACLs are enabled then there are 2 possibilities: either bucket owner preferred or Object writer is selected. In first case, the bucket owner owns and has full control over new objects that other accounts write to the bucket with the bucket-owner-full-control canned ACL. But in 2nd case, the AWS account that uploads an object owns the object, has full control over it, and can grant other users access to it through ACLs.

Q. What are the different ways for sharing resources in AWS S3?

Answer: There are several different ways that you can share resources with a specific group of users. You can use the following tools to share a set of documents or other resources to a single group of users, department, or an office.

(1) S3 Object Ownership: S3 Object Ownership is an Amazon S3 bucket-level setting that you can use to disable ACLs and take ownership of every object in your bucket, simplifying access management for data stored in Amazon S3. By default, when another AWS account uploads an object to your S3 bucket, that account (the object writer) owns the object, has access to it, and can grant other users access to it through ACLs. You can use Object Ownership to change this default behavior so that ACLs are disabled and you, as the bucket owner, automatically own every object in your bucket.

(2) User policies: You can share resources with a limited group of people using IAM groups and user policies. When creating a new IAM user, you are prompted to create and add them to a group. However, you can create and add users to groups at any point. If the individuals you intend to share these resources with are already set up within IAM, you can add them to a common group and share the bucket with their group within the user policy. You can also use IAM user policies to share individual objects within a bucket.

(3) Access control lists: As a general rule, we recommend that you use S3 bucket policies or IAM policies for access control.

Amazon S3 ACLs are the original access control mechanism in Amazon S3 that predates IAM. If you already use S3 ACLs and you find them sufficient, there is no need to change. However, certain access control scenarios require the use of ACLs. For example, when a bucket owner wants to grant permission to objects, but not all objects are owned by the bucket owner, the object owner must first grant permission to the bucket owner. This is done using an object ACL. A majority of modern use cases in Amazon S3 no longer require the use of ACLs, and we recommend that you disable ACLs except in unusual circumstances where you must control access for each object individually. With Object Ownership, you can disable ACLs and rely on policies for access control. When you disable ACLs, you can easily maintain a bucket with objects uploaded by different AWS accounts.

You, as the bucket owner, own all the objects in the bucket and can manage access to them using policies.

(4) Prefixes: When trying to share specific resources from a bucket, you can replicate folder-level permissions using prefixes. The Amazon S3 console supports the folder concept as a means of grouping objects by using a shared name prefix for objects. You can then specify a prefix within the conditions of an IAM user's policy to grant them explicit permission to access the resources associated with that prefix.

(5) Tagging: If you use object tagging to categorize storage, you can share objects that have been tagged with a specific value with specified users. Resource tagging allows you to control access to objects based on the tags associated with the resource that a user is trying to access. To do this, use the ResourceTag/keyname condition within an IAM user policy to allow access to the tagged resources.

Q. What are the different ways for protecting resources in AWS S3?

(1) Object encryption: Amazon S3 offers several object encryption options that protect data in transit and at rest. Server-side encryption encrypts your object before saving it on disks in its data centers and then decrypts it when you download the objects. As long as you authenticate your request and you have access permissions, there is no difference in the way you access encrypted or unencrypted objects. When setting up serverside encryption, you have three mutually exclusive options:

• Server-side encryption with Amazon S3 managed keys (SSE-S3)

• Server-side encryption with AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) keys (SSE-KMS)

• Server-side encryption with customer-provided keys (SSE-C)

(2) Signing methods: Signature Version 4 is the process of adding authentication information to AWS requests sent by HTTP.

For security, most requests to AWS must be signed with an access key, which consists of an access key ID and secret access key. These two keys are commonly referred to as your security credentials.

(3) Logging and monitoring: Monitoring is an important part of maintaining the reliability, availability, and performance of your Amazon S3 solutions so that you can more easily debug a multi-point failure if one occurs. Logging can provide insight into any errors users are receiving, and when and what requests are made. AWS provides several tools for monitoring your Amazon S3 resources:

• Amazon CloudWatch

• AWS CloudTrail

• Amazon S3 Access Logs

• AWS Trusted Advisor

NOTE Amazon S3 is integrated with AWS CloudTrail, a service that provides a record of actions taken by a user, a role, or an AWS service in Amazon S3.