Amazon Web Services has produced something amazing for its users – the Simple Storage Service or, as it is otherwise known, the S3. Amazon S3 gives users access to reliable and scalable object storage. With an amazing deal of flexibility in managing data and access control, this might just be the best thing they’ve come up with.
Designed intentionally to offer simplicity, S3 allows its users to access a huge array of Amazon resources. The performance benchmarks Amazon claims for this invention are huge – 100 to 200 milliseconds small object latencies and 55,000 read requests per second.
But, even though you know all this, how can you optimize the S3 performance? This is what you’ll learn in the article below.
Tip 1: Learn How to Use Amazon S3
Amazon has already come up with a detailed, useful guide about using S3. Get some information on it – this should help you learn how it works and what the best way to optimize it is. If you are using Mac, you should definitely read this Amazon s3 guide also. It teaches you how to set it up on your Mac with minimal effort.
Try to delve deeper into the guides than just the basics. There’s a ton of actionable information that you can find online to use for when you actually need the S3. And of course, there are the tips that follow.
Tip 2: Access the Data Lifecycles Upfront
There’s one common mistake among users – they don’t stop to consider that large datasets expire unless processed. If you want unprocessed, raw logs for longer period of time, you need to consider upfront what will happen with your data over time.
The idea is to dedicate some time inspecting the lifecycles of your data. S3 has a great object tagging feature that you can use to categorize the storage based on the lifecycle needs. If you want to eliminate some of the data when you no longer need it, you can simply do so by using the tags. It makes things simpler and safer for you.
And of course, there’s the feature “object mutability”. This means that you will store objects that can only be deleted when you decide to do so, and can never be modified in any way.
Tip 3: Scale the Request Rates
Yes, S3 supports 5500 GET requests per second and at least 3500 post/put/delete requests per second. But, you might find yourself needing more, which is when things get tricky.
There’s no limit to the number of prefixes you can add in a bucket, so it’s always wise to scale the request rates. Many S3 users don’t use partitioning, which is a huge mistake and causes them tons of troubles. In the use of S3, there’s one golden rule – organized files lead to better performance. It makes finding things easier, but it also assists with request rates.
Tip 4: Take Your Time to Understand the New Object Naming
For some reason, Amazon has decided to stray from the traditional structure found in directories. So, you won’t find folders or subfolders in the S3. This doesn’t mean that you cannot organize your files, but you’ll still need to learn object naming to make it work for you.
To put it simply, S3 makes filenames perform what a directory would in a traditional sense. It might be confusing at first, but soon enough, you’ll find this to be very effective and simple.
In fact, there’s one trick that you can make to ease your process – give all folders and subfolders names, so you can recall the objects easier later on.
Tip 5: Pay Attention to Versioning Issues
Have you noticed a significant spike in HTTP 503 slow down responses?
If this happens, you might have a versioning issue, which is not good, of course. This happens. The buckets that have this option enabled can come up with millions of versions in an instant, which will bring many more problems with your S3 – and might even cause it to slow down.
Thankfully, Amazon has thought of this too. They have an S3 Inventory Tool that you can use to check such issues, and you can always reach out to the AWS support team if you notice such a thing happening.
Wrapping Up
There are many things that you can do to improve the Amazon S3 performance. These are just to get you started, but they will prove useful if you practice them. Remember – learning how to handle S3 might be tough at first, but with a bit of practice, this can be an amazing solution for storing your data safely and in an organized manner.