October 10, 20212 min read

3 Secret Features in AWS S3

Ship 30

Since their inception in 2006, AWS has grown to be the largest cloud compute provider in the world.

In the beginning they had a limited offering of services. One that's grown to see wild success is S3 - their Simple Storage Service.

While it's most commonly known to be a place to store files in the cloud, I'm here to tell you about 3 secret features hidden within S3 that you should be take advantage of.

Host Static Websites

You've built a website and decided to host all of your images out of an S3 bucket. Why not host the site itself there too?

Using the static website hosting feature, S3 will provide you an AWS domain through which it serves up your static website built using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Name your bucket strategically enough and you can even bring your own custom domain name as well.

Content & Media Streaming

Trying to watch the Lord of the Rings trilogy out of an S3 bucket?

S3 buckets have the ability to serve audio, video, pdfs, and more in chunks to enable data streaming.

Developers can use the Content-Length HTTP header within their application to reduce load times and save the user on their monthly bandwidth.

Gated Resources with Presigned URLs

Want to store & share a sensitive file to certain people but not the entire web?

Presigned URLs have your back.

Set your file to private and generate a presigned URL that can be shared to those with need-to-know access.

You can even set up capabilities such as time restriction, action, inbound network, and more.