Accessing an Amazon S3 bucket
You can access your Amazon S3 buckets by using the Amazon S3 console, AWS Command Line Interface, AWS SDKs, or the Amazon S3 REST API. Each method of accessing an S3 bucket supports specific use cases. For more information, see the following sections.
Use cases
Depending on the use case for your Amazon S3 bucket, there are different recommended methods to access the underlying data in your buckets. The following list includes common use cases for accessing your data.
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Static websites – You can use Amazon S3 to host a static website. In this use case, you can configure your S3 bucket to function like a website. For an example that walks you through the steps of hosting a website on Amazon S3, see Tutorial: Configuring a static website on Amazon S3.
To host a static website with security settings like Block Public Access enabled, we recommend using Amazon CloudFront with Origin Access Control (OAC) and implementing additional security headers, such as HTTPS. For more information, see Getting started with a secure static website.
Note
Amazon S3 supports both virtual-hosted–style and path-style URLs for static website access. Because buckets can be accessed using path-style and virtual-hosted–style URLs, we recommend that you create buckets with DNS-compliant bucket names. For more information, see Bucket quotas, limitations, and restrictions.
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Shared datasets – As you scale on Amazon S3, it's common to adopt a multi-tenant model, where you assign different end customers or business units to unique prefixes within a shared bucket. By using Amazon S3 access points, you can divide one large bucket policy into separate, discrete access point policies for each application that needs to access the shared dataset. This approach makes it simpler to focus on building the right access policy for an application without disrupting what any other application is doing within the shared dataset. For more information, see Managing access to shared datasets with access points.
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High-throughput workloads – Mountpoint for Amazon S3 is a high-throughput open source file client for mounting an Amazon S3 bucket as a local file system. With Mountpoint, your applications can access objects stored in Amazon S3 through file-system operations, such as open and read. Mountpoint automatically translates these operations into S3 object API calls, giving your applications access to the elastic storage and throughput of Amazon S3 through a file interface. For more information, see Working with Mountpoint for Amazon S3.
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Multi-Region applications – Amazon S3 Multi-Region Access Points provide a global endpoint that applications can use to fulfill requests from S3 buckets that are located in multiple AWS Regions. You can use Multi-Region Access Points to build multi-Region applications with the same architecture that's used in a single Region, and then run those applications anywhere in the world. Instead of sending requests over the public internet, Multi-Region Access Points provide built-in network resilience with acceleration of internet-based requests to Amazon S3. For more information, see Managing multi-Region traffic with Multi-Region Access Points.
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Secure Shell (SSH) File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) – If you’re trying to securely transfer sensitive data over the internet, you can use an SFTP-enabled server with your Amazon S3 bucket. AWS SFTP is a network protocol that supports the full security and authentication functionality of SSH. With this protocol, you have fine-grained control over user identity, permissions, and keys or you can use IAM policies to manage access. To associate an SFTP enabled server with your Amazon S3 bucket, make sure to create your SFTP-enabled server first. Then, you set up user accounts, and associate the server with an Amazon S3 bucket. For a walkthrough of this process, see AWS Transfer for SFTP – Fully Managed SFTP Service for Amazon S3
in AWS Blogs.
Amazon S3 console
The console is a web-based user interface for managing Amazon S3 and AWS resources. With the Amazon S3 console, you can easily access a bucket and modify the bucket's properties. You can also perform most bucket operations by using the console UI, without having to write any code.
If you've signed up for an AWS account, you can access the Amazon S3 console by signing
into the Amazon S3 console and choosing S3 from the Amazon S3 console home
page. You can also use this link to directly access the https://console.aws.amazon.com/s3/
AWS CLI
You can use the AWS CLI to issue commands or build scripts at your system's command line to perform AWS (including S3) tasks. For example, if you need to access multiple buckets, you can save time by using the AWS CLI to automate common and repetitive tasks. Scriptability and repeatability for common actions are frequent considerations as organizations scale.
The AWS CLI
AWS SDKs
AWS provides SDKs (software development kits) that consist of libraries and sample code
for various programming languages and platforms (Java, Python, Ruby, .NET, iOS,
Android, and so on). The AWS SDKs provide a convenient way to create programmatic
access to S3 and AWS. Amazon S3 is a REST service. You can send requests to Amazon S3 using
the AWS SDK libraries, which wrap the underlying Amazon S3 REST API and simplify your
programming tasks. For example, the SDKs take care of tasks such as calculating
signatures, cryptographically signing requests, managing errors, and retrying
requests automatically. For information about the AWS SDKs, including how to
download and install them, see Tools for
AWS
Every interaction with Amazon S3 is either authenticated or anonymous. If you are using the AWS SDKs, the libraries compute the signature for authentication from the keys that you provide. For more information about how to make requests to Amazon S3, see Making requests .
Amazon S3 REST API
The architecture of Amazon S3 is designed to be programming language-neutral, using AWS-supported interfaces to store and retrieve objects. You can access S3 and AWS programmatically by using the Amazon S3 REST API. The REST API is an HTTP interface to Amazon S3. With the REST API, you use standard HTTP requests to create, fetch, and delete buckets and objects.
To use the REST API, you can use any toolkit that supports HTTP. You can even use a browser to fetch objects, as long as they are anonymously readable.
The REST API uses standard HTTP headers and status codes, so that standard browsers and toolkits work as expected. In some areas, we have added functionality to HTTP (for example, we added headers to support access control). In these cases, we have done our best to add the new functionality in a way that matches the style of standard HTTP usage.
If you make direct REST API calls in your application, you must write the code to compute the signature and add it to the request. For more information about how to make requests to Amazon S3, see Making requests in the Amazon S3 API Reference.
