S3 summary
S3 is an object storage concept developed and integrated by Amazon Web Services (AWS). Objects1 are organized into buckets2. S3 is designed to be scalable, secure, reliable, fast and interoperable. S3 is a modern alternative to FTP, suitable for systems with many nodes/clients.
S3 is managed through the open S3 REST (HTTP) interface. The open S3 REST API has been adopted by several open source projects, allowing for free self hosted object (file) storage solutions. Additionally, the S3 REST API is now also supported by competing cloud services.
S3 SDKs are available for all major programming languages, making it easy to manage S3 servers from custom applications.
In short, the S3 REST API can be used to communicate with object storage servers provided by any S3 compatible cloud service or any S3 compatible self hosted server solution (e.g. MinIO). This makes S3 ideal for systems ranging from a few devices with storage hosted on a regular PC - to thousands of devices with storage hosted in the cloud.