Amazon S3 Express One Zone: Unveiling Next-Gen High-Performance Storage

Introduction

Amazon S3 Express One Zone is a high-performance, single-zone Amazon S3 storage class designed to provide reliable, single-digit millisecond data access for your most latency-sensitive applications. The lowest latency cloud object storage class currently available is S3 Express One Zone, which has request prices 50% less than S3 Standard and data access speeds upto 10 times faster. The performance elasticity offered by S3 Express One Zone is equal to that of other S3 storage types. Depending on your needs, your storage can scale up or down, and you can use the Amazon S3 API to access your data.

The first S3 storage class to offer a single Availability Zone selection and the ability to co-locate object storage and compute resources for optimal access speed is the S3 Express One Zone. Data in the S3 Express One Zone storage class is kept in a new bucket to boost access performance and handle hundreds of thousands of requests per second:  Amazon S3 directory bucket. Each directory bucket, independent of key names or access patterns, can support hundreds of thousands of transactions per second (TPS). The Amazon S3 Express One Zone storage class has been designed for 99.95 percent availability within a single Availability Zone. Your data is redundantly stored across several devices in a single Availability Zone when you use S3 Express One Zone. S3 Express One Zone is made to rapidly detect and restore any lost redundancy to manage simultaneous device failures. If the current device fails, S3 Express One Zone automatically transfers requests to new devices within an Availability Zone. Within an Availability Zone, this redundancy ensures that your data is always accessible.

Use Cases

For any application that aims to reduce the latency needed to access an object, S3 Express One Zone is perfect.

Data analytics – Improve query speed to obtain insights from analytics on petabytes of data by utilizing this lowest latency storage in the cloud, high throughput, and faster processing speeds.

High-performance computing (HPC) – With fast, highly scalable storage co-located with your computation resources, you can efficiently perform compute-intensive HPC applications.

Real-time advertising – Provide customized advertising content with a request delay of only single-digit milliseconds to enhance personalization and accelerate ad delivery in dynamic placements.

Machine learning and artificial intelligence training – By greatly increasing the speed at which data can be accessed, you may expedite the training and development of models by processing datasets more quickly.

Things to know

You should know the following before using the S3 Express One Zone storage class.

1. Regions – Amazon S3 Express One Zone is available in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and Europe (Stockholm) Regions.
2. New bucket type – The new directory buckets can handle hundreds of thousands of queries per second and are specific to this storage class. They hold object key names in a directory-like fashion and have a hierarchical namespace.
3. Bucket naming – Besides being unique inside their AWS Region, directory bucket names need to include an Availability Zone ID in a specifically constructed suffix. If my bucket name is dev and it exists in Availability Zone use1-az2 (Availability Zone 4 in the US East (N. Virginia) Region), the name I supply to CreateBucket would be dev–use1-az4–x-s3. There are no data transfer fees for requests from compute resources in one Availability Zone to directory buckets in another in the same region, even when the bucket is inside that zone. It is also reachable from the other zones in the region.
4. Pricing – Similar to other S3 storage classes, a pay-as-you-go pricing model exists. In the US East (North Virginia) Region, you pay $0.16 per GB each month.
5. Other AWS Services – Combining Amazon S3 Express One Zone with AWS services like Amazon SageMaker Model Training, Amazon Athena, Amazon EMR, and AWS Glue Data Catalog can accelerate your machine learning and analytics workloads.

Networking for S3 Express One Zone

Using gateway VPC endpoints, you can access directory buckets and storage class objects for Amazon S3 Express One Zone from within your VPC. S3 Express One Zone uses regional and Zonal API endpoints. Regional or Zonal endpoints are needed, depending on your chosen Amazon S3 API operation. The use of gateway endpoints is free of charge.

Regional endpoint API operations are bucket-level API operations accessible via regional endpoints. The CreateBucket and DeleteBucket procedures are instances of regional endpoint API functions. You can upload and manage the objects in your directory bucket using Zonal endpoint API operations after you’ve created one. Examples of Zonal endpoint API operations are DeleteObject and PutObject.

Creating a directory bucket

You must create a directory bucket to use the Amazon S3 Express One Zone storage class. Directory buckets are the only storage class compatible with S3 Express One Zone.

1. Open the Amazon S3 console after logging into the AWS Management Console.
2. Select Buckets from the navigation pane on the left.
3. Select “Create bucket.” The page to create a bucket opens.

4. Select the AWS Region in which you want the directory bucket to be under the region.
5. For Bucket type, choose Directory.
6. Select an availability zone that is close to your computing services.
7. Select the check box to acknowledge that your data might be unavailable or lost in the event of an Availability Zone outage.

8. Select the check box to acknowledge that your data might be unavailable or lost in the event of an Availability Zone outage.
9. Provide a name for your directory bucket in the Bucket name field.

10. Keep other options default and then select Create bucket.

11. A bucket gets created.

Import object to directory bucket

Using the Import button, you can import the contents of an existing bucket into a directory bucket.

1. Select the bucket you created in the above step and then choose the Import option.

2. Choose a source bucket, click Import, and input the parameters needed to establish an S3 Batch Operations task and build an inventory of the source bucket.

3. Keep other options default and select Import.

4. The job is created and begins to execute.

5. Verify the import operation is completed.

About CloudThat

CloudThat is a leading provider of Cloud Training and Consulting services with a global presence in India, the USA, Asia, Europe, and Africa. Specializing in AWS, Microsoft Azure, GCP, VMware, Databricks, and more, the company serves mid-market and enterprise clients, offering comprehensive expertise in Cloud Migration, Data Platforms, DevOps, IoT, AI/ML, and more.

CloudThat is recognized as a top-tier partner with AWS and Microsoft, including the prestigious ‘Think Big’ partner award from AWS and the Microsoft Superstars FY 2023 award in Asia & India. Having trained 650k+ professionals in 500+ cloud certifications and completed 300+ consulting projects globally, CloudThat is an official AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, AWS Training Partner, AWS Migration Partner, AWS Data and Analytics Partner, AWS DevOps Competency Partner, Amazon QuickSight Service Delivery Partner, Amazon EKS Service Delivery Partner, Microsoft Gold Partner, AWS Microsoft Workload Partners, Amazon EC2 Service Delivery Partner, and many more.

To get started, go through our Consultancy page and Managed Services Package, CloudThat’s offerings.