Amazon S3 Essentials: Get started with Amazon S3 for virtually unlimited cloud and Internet storage

Allows website hosting: Amazon S3 allows users to host a website and map it to their domain. This is very cost effective, because the user pays only for what he/she uses. Moreover, the user doesn't require highly configured servers to serve the website.

Scalable: Amazon S3 doesn't restrict the user to any size limit for storing data. As it is a pay-as-you-go service, it stores the data, and the bill is generated accordingly. So the subscriber never faces a lack of space.

Reliable: Amazon S3 guarantees a server uptime of 99.9 percent. Therefore, the subscriber does not need to worry about data reliability.

Security: Amazon S3 provides a strong authentication mechanism where the stored data can be manipulated.

Standard interfaces: Amazon S3 provides the Representational State Transfer (REST) and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) web services that can be consumed by any web framework.

Reduced Redundancy Storage: Amazon S3 provides the subscribers with an optional feature for storing data with the Reduced Redundancy Storage (RRS) storage class. It is basically used for storing non-critical and reproducible data at lower levels of redundancy. The cost of storing on an RRS storage class is quite less as compared to the standard storage class.

Torrent tracking and seeding: Amazon S3 can act as a torrent tracker, and seed the files from your machine.

Share the data with a temporary URL: Amazon S3 provides the subscriber the ability to share a URL, which auto-expires after a period of time. This helps the subscriber in sharing the data for a minimal period of time. Other users cannot use that data after the URL expires.

Logging: It provides the logging of all activities that are performed on bucket. This makes it easy for the subscriber to audit the activities on the bucket if he so wishes. Generally, when a subscriber hosts a website on Amazon S3, he enables the logging feature to track the activities.

Versioning: Amazon S3 allows storing of multiple versions of an object. It is basically used for recovering old data that is lost unintentionally.

Security: Amazon S3 provides security on buckets and objects. While creating the buckets, you can provide access control lists for other users of the bucket who can create, update, delete, or list objects. You can even set the geographical location of your data.

Integration: Amazon S3 can be integrated with several other services such as Amazon EC2, Amazon EBS, Amazon Glacier, and many other applications. Generally, developers use Amazon S3 for storing images, videos, or documents, and for accessing them via HTTP Get.

File hosting: Companies often deploy their images, videos, audios, PDFs, DOCs, and other files in Amazon S3. This helps in loading the files directly from Amazon S3 without managing the on-premise infrastructure.

Storing data on mobile-based applications: Many users/companies go for Amazon S3 to store mobile app data. This becomes easy for user/companies to manage mobile user data over Amazon S3.

Static website hosting: Users can host their static website over Amazon S3 along with Amazon Route53.

Video Hosting: Companies upload their videos over Amazon S3, which can then be accessed on their website. Amazon S3 can also be configured to provide video streaming.

Backup: Users can keep a backup of their data, which will be securely and reliably stored in Amazon S3. Amazon S3 can also be configured to move the old data over to Amazon Glacier for archiving, as the Glacier costs less as compared to S3.

The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) machines where the application is deployed.

The Amazon Load Balancer will be responsible for redirecting the user request to specific applications deployed on the EC2 machines.

The Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) is used for storing application data. It provides scalability, durability, and an easy-to-manage database service.

Amazon S3 where the image/audio/video files are stored.

And lastly, the front devices like a laptop, desktop, or mobile applications that send requests to the application.