Karmona Pragmatic Blog

S3 (Simple Storage Device ) Overview

“Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers.” (http://aws.amazon.com/s3/)

What can I do with this S3 thingy?

Many things… but I will focus on a pragmatic and more common use case – You can use S3 as the ultimate network drive to share your music collection, backup your documents or to store your blog images (a.k.a. CDN for the masses) etc.

Is it free???

Almost…   $0.15 per Giga (+ you can estimate your monthly bill using the AWS Monthly Calculator)

How do I start?

To use Amazon S3 service, you’ll simply need to open an Amazon account and register to the S3.

Interesting tools to simplify your S3 experience:

• Amazon S3 Firefox Organizer – Simple Firefox add-on that provides an FTP like interface (Windows Explorer) to upload and manage files on S3 – “S3Fox Organizer helps you organize/manage/store your files on Amazon S3. It is easy to install and use as it is integrated into the browser…”

• Amazon S3 WordPress plugin – This plugin will help you to stores your files on Amazon S3.

• DropBox – New Amazon-S3-backed-storage service (thanks to Shlomo for the introduction) – Very simple to use and with 2GB storage limit on the default (free) account and paid upgrade to 50GB of space for $9.99 / month which is not that much above the $7.5 they need to pay to Amazon (before optimizations ;)

P.S. If you liked DropBox you might also like many others…

It seems like everywhere I go these days, people are talking about cloud computing… Would it be accurate to say that almost everyone are “fairly optimistic” regarding Cloud Computing?

For your convenient, I have collected few cloud-buzz-quotes to  spice your cloud computing elevator pitch:

• According to Gartner: “Cloud computing heralds an evolution of business that is no less influential than e-business”

• IDC on Cloud Computing: “This is about the IT industry’s new model for the next 20 years“, Vernon Turner, head of enterprise infrastructure, consumer and telecoms research.

• Merrill Lynch estimates that by 2012, the annual global market for cloud computing will surge to $95 billion and that 12% of the worldwide software market would go to the cloud in that period.

• In January of 2008 Amazon announced that the Amazon Web Services now consume more bandwidth than do the entire global network of Amazon.com retail sites…

• “… the new computing cloud age” Eric Schmidt (April, 2008)

Do you happen to have more???

I have just finished two “dirty” politics* books and while looking for more… ;-) I have reached this lovely “Http/1.1 Service Unavailable” notice at Amazon.com and later I even got blamed** to be a bot…???


Cnet says, “Based on last quarter’s revenue of $4.13 billion, a full-scale global outage would cost Amazon more than $31,000 per minute on average” (!!!)


Amazons, are you there???




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* The Prince by Machiavelli & Joseph Fouché – The Portrait of a Politician by Stefan Zweig

** “You have been denied access to this feature because we believe you violated the terms, conditions, rules, guidelines or policies of our site in the past. If you believe we have taken this action in error, you may contact us at ad-help-us@amazon.com.”