Amazon S3

Question 1

Q: What is Amazon S3?

Answer 1

A: Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) is an object storage service that provides scalability, data availability, security, and performance.

Question 2

Q: What are the key features of Amazon S3?

Answer 2

A: Durability, availability, scalability, versioning, lifecycle policies, encryption, and storage classes.

Question 3

Q: What is object storage in S3?

Answer 3

A: A storage architecture that manages data as objects, including the data itself, metadata, and a unique identifier.

Question 4

Q: What is an S3 bucket?

Answer 4

A: A container in S3 that stores objects (files), organized by regions and globally unique names.

Question 5

Q: What is the durability and availability of Amazon S3?

Answer 5

A: Durability: 99.999999999% (11 9s); Availability: 99.99% for the S3 Standard storage class.

Question 6

Q: What are the storage classes in S3?

Answer 6

• S3 Standard
• S3 Intelligent-Tiering
• S3 Standard-IA (Infrequent Access)
• S3 One Zone-IA
• S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval
• S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval
• S3 Glacier Deep Archive

Question 7

Q: What are the components of an S3 object?

Answer 7

A: Key (name), value (data), metadata, version ID, and storage class.

Question 8

Q: What is versioning in S3?

Answer 8

A: A feature that maintains multiple versions of an object within the same bucket, helping with data recovery and archiving.

Question 9

Q: What are lifecycle policies in S3?

Answer 9

A: Rules to automate transitioning objects between storage classes or deleting them after a specified time.

Question 10

Q: What are S3 bucket policies?

Answer 10

A: JSON-based policies that define access permissions at the bucket level.

Question 11

Q: What are S3 Access Control Lists (ACLs)?

Answer 11

A: Mechanisms to control access to individual objects or buckets.

Question 12

Q: What is CORS in S3?

Answer 12

A: Cross-Origin Resource Sharing allows you to configure how resources in a bucket can be accessed from different origins.

Question 13

Q: What server-side encryption options does S3 offer?

Answer 13

• SSE-S3: Amazon-managed keys
• SSE-KMS: AWS Key Management Service keys
• SSE-C: Customer-provided keys

Question 14

Q: What is client-side encryption in S3?

Answer 14

A: Encryption of data on the client side before uploading it to S3, ensuring that only encrypted data is sent to the server.

Question 15

Q: What is S3 Transfer Acceleration?

Answer 15

A: A feature that uses Amazon CloudFront’s globally distributed edge locations to accelerate data transfer to and from S3.

Question 16

Q: What is S3 Multipart Upload?

Answer 16

A: A feature that splits large files into smaller parts and uploads them in parallel, improving upload efficiency.

Question 17

Q: What is S3 Select?

Answer 17

A: A feature that allows you to retrieve a subset of data from an object using SQL-like queries.

Question 18

Q: What are S3 event notifications?

Answer 18

A: Configurations that enable S3 to send event notifications to services like Lambda, SQS, or SNS when specific events occur (e.g., object creation).

Question 19

Q: What type of data consistency does S3 offer?

Answer 19

• Strong consistency for read-after-write operations.
• Eventual consistency for overwrite and delete operations.

Question 20

Q: How do you prevent public access to S3 buckets?

Answer 20

A: By enabling “Block Public Access” settings on the bucket.

Question 21

Q: What are the types of S3 replication?

Answer 21

• Cross-Region Replication (CRR): Replicates objects to a bucket in another region.
• Same-Region Replication (SRR): Replicates objects to a bucket in the same region.

Question 22

Q: What is S3 Object Lock?

Answer 22

A: A feature that prevents objects from being deleted or overwritten during a specified retention period, ensuring compliance with data retention regulations.

Question 23

Q: What is the “Requester Pays” feature in S3?

Answer 23

A: A bucket setting where data transfer and request costs are paid by the requester instead of the bucket owner.

Question 24

Q: What logging options are available for S3?

Answer 24

• Server Access Logging: Logs requests to the bucket.
• CloudTrail Logging: Logs API calls for auditing purposes.

Question 25

Q: What is Amazon S3 Glacier?

Answer 25

A: A low-cost archival storage option for long-term data storage with three retrieval options: Instant Retrieval, Flexible Retrieval, and Deep Archive.

Question 26

Q: How can you optimize S3 performance?

Answer 26

A: By using partitioning, parallel uploads, Transfer Acceleration, and caching mechanisms.

Question 27

Q: How does Snowball integrate with S3?

Answer 27

A: Snowball devices can be used to transfer large amounts of data to and from S3 offline.

Question 28

Q: What is S3 Intelligent-Tiering?

Answer 28

A: A storage class that automatically moves objects to the most cost-effective access tier based on access patterns.

Question 29

Q: How can you reduce S3 costs?

Answer 29

A: Use lifecycle policies, delete unused data, leverage Intelligent-Tiering, and enable Requester Pays.

Question 30

Q: How does CloudFront work with S3?

Answer 30

A: Amazon CloudFront is used as a CDN to cache and deliver S3 content with low latency.

Question 31

Q: What are S3 presigned URLs?

Answer 31

A: URLs that allow temporary, secure access to objects in S3 without requiring credentials.

Question 32

Q: What are object tags in S3?

Answer 32

A: Metadata key-value pairs assigned to objects for categorization, cost tracking, or lifecycle policies.

Question 33

Q: What are the bucket naming rules in S3?

Answer 33

A: Bucket names must be globally unique, between 3-63 characters, and use only lowercase letters, numbers, and hyphens.

Question 34

Q: What does strong read-after-write consistency mean in S3?

Answer 34

A: Any write operation (e.g., PUT) is immediately visible to subsequent read requests.