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Object Storage

If you squint really hard, it feels like S3 is a file system in the cloud... but it's not. It's technically an object storage system - which is not quite the same thing.

Click to play video

Traditional File Storage

"File storage" is what you're already familiar with:

Files are stored in a hierarchy of directories
A file's system-level metadata (like timestamp and permissions) is managed by the file system, not the file itself

File storage is great for single-machine-use (like your laptop), but it doesn't distribute well across many servers. It's optimized for low-latency access to a small number of files on a single machine.

How Object Storage Differs

Object storage is designed to be more scalable, available, and durable than file storage because it can be easily distributed across many machines:

Objects are stored in a flat namespace (no directories)
An object's metadata is stored with the object itself

Assignment

Open the video object we uploaded in the last lesson in the S3 console and look at the "Object overview" - you should see a bunch of metadata about the object:
- Size
- Type
- Entity tag
- etc.
Use the AWS CLI to read the metadata of your uploaded vertical video object, and redirect the output to /tmp/object_metadata.json

aws s3api head-object --bucket BUCKET_NAME --key OBJECT_KEY --output json > /tmp/object_metadata.json

Replace BUCKET_NAME and OBJECT_KEY with the name of your bucket and the key of your object

Run and submit the CLI tests.