Amazon Simple Storage Service

The book I read to research this post was Amazon Simple Storage Service Developer Guide which is a very good book which I downloaded for free from kindle. A lot of this book is hands on using Amazon S3. Amazon S3 doesn't require an operating system like EC2 and is simply storage. Amazon only bills you for the storage used and there are no upper limits and they don't penalize you if you go over a certain amount. A single upload can't be more than 5Gb & the total load uploaded in multiple amounts can't exceed 5Tb. You can choose which service centre you use and many companies use 2 so if one goes down they can use an alternative. Currently there are several servers in the USA, one in Ireland, Singapore, Tokyo & Sao Paulo in Brazil. It is compatible with a lot of the other Amazon products. Many companies use Import / Export which is a high speed internal network that will copy your data onto S3 as well as EC2 and this is especially useful if you have several terrabytes of data.