Amazon S3 Express One Zone: A new storage class for performance-critical applications

Amazon has announced the general availability of Amazon S3 Express One Zone, a new storage class designed to deliver the highest performance and lowest latency object storage for customers’ most frequently accessed data. It is up to 10 times faster than Amazon S3 Standard and can reduce request costs by up to 50%.

Amazon S3 Express One Zone is ideal for performance-critical applications such as machine learning (ML) training and inference, interactive analytics, and media content creation. It is available in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Europe (Stockholm), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo), with availability in additional AWS Regions coming soon.

What is Amazon S3 Express One Zone?

Amazon S3 Express One Zone is a new storage class that is designed to deliver the lowest latency and highest throughput for object storage. It is built on purpose-built hardware and software that is optimized for performance. Amazon S3 Express One Zone stores data in a new bucket type called an Amazon S3 directory bucket. This type of bucket is designed to support millions of requests per minute.

“Millions of customers rely on Amazon S3 for everything from low-cost archival storage to petabyte-scale data lakes, and they want to expand their use to support their most performance-intensive applications where every millisecond counts,” said James Kirschner, general manager of Amazon S3 at AWS. “Amazon S3 Express One Zone delivers the fastest data access speed for the most latency-sensitive applications and enables customers to make millions of requests per minute for their highly accessed datasets, while also reducing request and compute costs.”

How does Amazon S3 Express One Zone work?

Amazon S3 Express One Zone works by replicating data across multiple nodes in an AWS Availability Zone. This ensures that data is always available, even if one node fails. Amazon S3 Express One Zone also uses a technique called erasure coding to protect data from corruption.

What are the benefits of using Amazon S3 Express One Zone?

There are many benefits to using Amazon S3 Express One Zone, including:

• Up to 10 times faster data access speed than Amazon S3 Standard
• Up to 50% lower request costs than Amazon S3 Standard
• Consistent, single-digit millisecond data access latency
• Scales to millions of requests per minute
• Stores data on purpose-built hardware and software
• Can be collocated with compute resources in the same AWS Availability Zone
• Supports Amazon S3 features such as Mountpoint for Amazon S3, Amazon S3 Server-Side Encryption, and Amazon S3 Block Public Access
• Supports AWS services such as Amazon EMR, Amazon Redshift, Amazon SageMaker, and Amazon Bedrock

Who is using Amazon S3 Express One Zone?

Amazon S3 Express One Zone is being used by a wide range of customers, including ChaosSearch, Cloudera, Colorfront, and Pinterest.

• ChaosSearch is using Amazon S3 Express One Zone to achieve 60% faster queries and substantial cost savings through lower query costs.
• Cloudera customers can achieve up to 40% faster read and write performance with Amazon S3 Express One Zone.
• Colorfront customers can accelerate their digital video processing by up to 70% with Amazon S3 Express One Zone.
• Pinterest is using Amazon S3 Express One Zone to see latency improvements of over 10 times while increasing its data processing transactions per second.

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