Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3 storage offering is now available via AWS Dedicated Local Zones, one of its on-premise cloud offerings.

AWS has launched two storage classes for Dedicated Local Zones - the S3 Express One Zone, and the S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access storage classes.

At the company's Re:Invent 2024 conference, AWS also revealed new S3 solutions: S3 Tables and S3 Metadata.

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– Sebastian Moss

The storage classes are designed to store data within a specific data perimeter to meet data isolation and residency requirements.

Amazon S3 Express One Zone is described as a high-performance, single-zone Amazon S3 storage class with single-digit millisecond data access for the most latency-sensitive applications. It offers data access speeds up to 10x faster and costs 50 percent less than the S3 Standard. The One Zone-Infrequent Access is a more affordable solution for data that does not need to be accessed as often.

To use the S3 storage, you create S3 directory buckets to store data in a specific data perimeter. According to AWS, the offering is not available in other AWS Local Zones locations.

AWS Dedicated Local Zones are a type of AWS Infrastructure that is fully managed by AWS and built for exclusive use by an organization or community. The hardware is housed in a location or data center specified by the organization.

The offering was launched in August 2023 and was posited as a solution to eliminate the operational overhead of on-premise AWS Outpost racks at scale.

Amazon S3 - or Amazon Simple Storage Service - is an object storage service offering a high level of scalability, data availability, security, and performance.

During the Day Two Keynote with CEO Matt Garman, AWS also launched new S3 offerings: Amazon S3 Tables, which are now generally available, and S3 Metadata.

"S3 now stores over 400 trillion objects," said Garman. "It's just incredible."

Garman noted that most customer analytics data is organized in a tabular form, and with Apache Iceberg being particularly popular, AWS launched S3 Tables.

"S3 Tables is a new bucket type specifically for Iceberg tables. We basically improve the performance scalability of all of your Iceberg tables," said Garman.

Amazon S3 Tables enables users to access a 3x faster query performance and up to 10 higher transactions per second for Apache Iceberg tables.

S3 Tables automatically handles all the table maintenance events such as compaction and snapshot management.

"S3 is completely reinventing object storage specifically for data lake growth, delivering better performance, better cost, and better scale. I think this is a game changer for data lake performance," said Garman.

Noting that as data volumes scale, locating specific data is increasingly complicated, Garman added that AWS is launching Amazon S3 Metadata.

Amazon S3 Metadata - now available in preview - takes the metadata associated with a file and makes it easily queryable metadata that updates in real-time.

"We take all of your object metadata and store it in one of these new table models that we talked about. So we automatically store all of your object metadata in an Iceberg table, and then you can use your favorite analytics tool to easily interact and query that data to quickly learn more about your objects and find the object you're looking for, and as objects change, S3 automatically actually updates metadata, so it's always up to date," explained Garman.