AWS S3 Storage Lens: Unveiling Advanced Features

Amazon S3 storage lens is one of the effective feature of AWS S3 service which provides the customer the metrics to understand how the data is stored in AWS S3. This can help our customers analyze and optimize the storage using metrics and the AWS dashboard to aggregate the organization’s data. The S3 storage lens provides a dashboard to help the organization visualize insights and trends, flag outliers, and receive recommendations.

Types of Use Cases:

S3 Storage lens is used in the various use cases such as:

• Optimizing the cost
• Protecting the data
• Providing the object ownership to the users
• Improving the performance workload

Use Cases:

Let’s understand each of the use cases where we can implement the S3 storage Lens:

Using S3 Storage Lens for cost optimization:

The S3 storage lens can be used for cost optimization metrics to reduce the storage cost in S3. The cost optimization metrics can help us to analyze how we have configured S3 effectively and followed the best practices to store data in S3. Below are the examples that can help us to identify the cost optimization opportunities with S3:

• S3 Buckets with incomplete multi-part uploads older than seven days
• S3 Buckets that do not have lifecycle rules to transition the object to the different storage classes.
• S3 Bucket that does not have a lifecycle rule to abort incomplete multipart upload.

How can we use the Storage lens to optimize the cost:

We can use cost optimization metrics in the S3 storage Lens to:

• • Identify the largest S3 buckets
  • To uncover cold S3 buckets
  • To identify incomplete multi-part upload
  • To reduce the number of non-current versions retained

Using S3 storage Lens to protect the data:

S3 storage lens can be used for data protection metrics to identify the buckets to which the best practices of protecting the data are not applied. The metrics can be used to apply the standard and take action to protect the data across all the buckets in AWS accounts or the organization. We can use data protection metrics to identify the buckets that don’t use KMS for encryption or requests that use the AWS signature version2.

Below are the strategies that can be applied using the S3 storage lens to identify outliers and apply data protection best practices to S3 buckets:

• Identify the S3 buckets that do not use server-side encryption with KMS.
• Identify the S3 buckets that have versioning enabled.
• Identify the S3 buckets that request to use the signature version2.
• Identify the total number of replication rules applied for each S3 bucket.
• Identify the total percentage of object lock bytes.

Using S3 storage Lens for providing the object ownership for users:

S3 object ownership is an S3-level setting that can disable ACLs and control ownership of the objects in S3 buckets. We can use S3 storage lens access management metrics to identify S3 buckets that are not ACL disabled. After identifying the buckets, we can migrate ACL permissions to policies and disable ACL to buckets.

Below are the strategies that can be used to identify the object with ACL disabled:

• By identifying the general trends for object ownership settings
• By identifying bucket-level trends for object ownership settings
• By updating the object ownership setting to bucket owner enforced to disable ACLs

Using storage lens to improve the performance of S3:

By enabling S3 storage Lens advanced metrics, we can view the detailed status code metrics to get the count of success and failure requests. This can be used to troubleshoot the access and the performance issues. Details status code metrics can provide the count for HTTP status codes like 403 and 503.

We can look at the 403 forbidden error count metrics to identify the workloads that are accessing the bucket without applying the correct permissions

We can do the trend analysis for all kinds of status code metrics, such as:

• By doing the trend analysis for individual HTTP status code
• By analyzing the error count in buckets
• By troubleshooting the error in buckets.

Conclusion

In conclusion, AWS S3 Storage Lens is a powerful feature that provides valuable metrics for understanding and optimizing data storage in Amazon S3. With applications in cost optimization, data protection, object ownership, and performance improvement, it offers a comprehensive solution. Leveraging S3 Storage Lens enables users to analyze, identify outliers, and implement best practices for efficient and secure S3 storage. Whether optimizing costs, enhancing data protection, managing object ownership, or troubleshooting performance, S3 Storage Lens proves to be an invaluable tool for organizations harnessing the full potential of AWS S3.

To learn more about enabling S3 Storage Lens to your S3 buckets, read the blog about What is AWS S3 Storage Lens? and How to Create One? – CloudThat Resources.

Further Reading

https://aws.amazon.com/s3/storage-lens/

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