AWS Simple Storage Service (S3)

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) is an industry leading service for scalable and secure object storage!

There are so many use cases for S3 including; storage (photos, videos, documents etc.), backup/recovery and even static website hosting!

You will find as you start to work with more and more of Amazon web services, that most of them expect data to be stored in S3 or at least interact with S3 at some point.

I thought it would be worth putting together this short blog to show you how to do some of the following things using the S3 console:

Creating a bucket
Create folders within a bucket
Deleting folders/files

To do this navigate to the AWS Console and search for S3:

This will bring you to the s3 console, which will look something like this:

Creating a bucket To create a bucket, you can simply select the orange Create Bucket button on the right hand side of the screen.

Once you click on this, you will be directed to the following page to enter some details about this bucket:

First of all you want to start by giving your bucket a name, there are some restrictions on what you can call it — the name needs to be unique and it must not contain any spaces or uppercase letters.

You then need to choose the region for your bucket, for this you will want to select a region that is closet to you, to try and minimise latency! So I have named my bucket test-bucket-for-blog and have choose Ireland for my region.

The next step is regarding bucket public access, by default a bucket is set to block public access, meaning only account administrators can access what is stored in it. In some cases you may want to uncheck this for example, if you are hosting a static website, you would want this to be public. We are going to go ahead and use the default settings and keep the bucket private:

The next step is regarding bucket versioning — you can turn this on if you want to preserve, retrieve or restore older versions of objects stored in the bucket.

I am going to go ahead and keep this as the default of Disable

Next up is Tags which can be added to any AWS resource. It is good practice to add tags when creating resources as t makes it easy to categorise like which project it is being used for, what environment its for and it can also help keep track of expenses for different categories!

Now that you have filled in some details about the bucket you can go ahead and click Create Bucket at the bottom of the screen.

Then you will be directed back to the landing page of the S3 console and you will see this green alert message appear once you bucket has been successfully created:

and you will see if appear on the list of buckets:

If you go ahead and click on the name of the bucket, it will open it up like below and will allow you to perform multiple actions on it:

Creating a folder

Now that we have our bucket created, we can go ahead and create a folder within it to store some data!

To do this go ahead and click on the Create Folder button:

Which will then display the following and all you need to do is simply enter in the name of the folder and select save:

It’s as easy as that and now you will see if being displayed inside your bucket:

Uploading data

Now that we have a folder inside our bucket, we can go ahead and click on the name of it, to get inside it.

Once inside the folder, you can select the Upload button, to upload data into it:

You will then see the following pop-up, that allows you to either drag and drop a file/folder or browse for one.

Once you have selected your file/folder you can simply just hit Upload at the bottom left hand corner of the pop-up:

And now your data should be uploaded!

Deleting a file

So now that we have uploaded data into our bucket, we might realise that it is the wrong file and want to remove it from the bucket. To do this simply select the check box side the files name:

And then if you click on the Actions drop down button above it, you will see the option to delete:

Conclusion

This has been a very short overview for just getting started with S3 and understanding how to navigate around it.

I have created some blogs on using other AWS services, that require some S3 set up, so if you are interested in learning more, pleases check out my other blogs so that you can put this new knowledge to the test!