Amazon S3 is one of the main services offered by AWS. It is hard to imagine implementing even the most trivial architecture without using S3 buckets. In this recipe, you will create buckets in three ways – by using the web console, the command-line interface (CLI), and with CloudFormation. You will create buckets with different properties each time to give you a sample of the various configurations that are possible.

S3 provides a web-based service for hosting files. Files are referred to as objects and grouped in buckets. An object is effectively a key-value pair, similar to a document database. Keys are used like file paths, with / used as a separator and grouping character. Buckets can be accessed easily, like a website via an automatically generated domain name.

The following are some recommended use cases for S3:

• Static website assets
• Sharing large files
• Short-term (that is, warm) backups