What is Amazon S3?
Amazon Simple Storage Service, better known as Amazon S3, is a scalable, security, and performant object storage service hosted within the Amazon Web Services cloud. A general purpose storage solution, S3 is used for backups, static web hosting, content delivery networks, large scale data processing, and for ensuring compliance with with PCI-DSS, HIPAA, and FISMA, among others.
What is an Amazon S3 Object?
Amazon S3 stores data as an object rather than as part of a file system typically used on by a traditional server or laptop. This paradigm is superior to that embraced by block storage file systems for several reasons. In addition to better performance and scalability, there are more flexible opportunities for data access and management. For instance S3 objects can be accessed via a native REST API, the BitTorrent protocol, and the Amazon console. Additionally, S3 administrators can optionally enable object versioning.
Each object is organized within buckets, which can conceptually be thought of as folders. Access control lists (ACLs) can be applied to both buckets and objects.
Does Amazon AWS S3 Have an API?
Amazon S3 does offer a REST API capable of standard CRUD operations including creating, retrieving, updating, and deleting objects and buckets, as well as carrying out various administrative tasks. Like any API, interacting with it directly is pretty tedious, so you'll want to use a programming language-specific SDK as a conduit for executing REST calls.
What is the DreamFactory AWS S3 API Connector?
The DreamFactory AWS S3 connector offers a convenient REST-based interface for interacting with S3 objects and buckets. Supporting all of the standard CRUD operations, it's easy to interact with and manage your S3 data. Further, because the S3 API is native to DreamFactory, it's easy to integrate S3 actions alongside other API-driven tasks such as:
- Uploading a newly registered user avatar to S3 while inserting the user's registration information into a database
- Emailing a website visitor a link to your product PDF after writing the user's email address to your marketing automation software
- Creating a new S3 bucket as part of a devops workflow
Further, because the API is part of the DreamFactory API management ecosystem, you can apply DreamFactory's context-specific role-based access controls to your AWS S3 API, attach API request volume limiting controls, and audit access logs via DreamFactory's Logstash integration.
