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AWS S3
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is AWS' object storage service. Think of it as slower, but very scalable storage for files (objects) in containers (buckets). It's relatively cheap and very reliable at huge scales.
By "slow," I mean it's not designed for low-latency access like a database, and it's not designed to be easily searchable. It's designed for storing and retrieving files by their key (filename).
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You probably store user records (first name, last name, email, password) in a traditional relational database, like Amazon RDS. However, you might store PDFs, images, and videos in S3.
A key feature of S3 is that it's "serverless." It's not serverless compute, but rather serverless storage. You don't have to manage, scale, or secure the individual servers that store your files. AWS does all that for you.
Instead of interacting with a file system, your server makes network requests to the S3 API to read and write files.
Bucket names must be globally unique across all AWS accounts (they appear in URLs). So, choose a random codename for your bucket and append it to the end. In this course we use the pattern patientping-favicon-bucket-${codename} (e.g. a1b2c3d4).
Cost check: S3 storage costs about $0.023 per GB per month. You pay for storage and requests; for the small buckets and objects used in this course, the cost is minimal.