Cloud world standards constantly become more demanding and high upload speed becomes a must, especially in business analytics and other real-time data processing areas. Being the world's leading provider of cloud solutions, Amazon Web Services intends to meet this challenge. So, a feature ensuring faster data transfer called Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration was added to Amazon S3.
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What is Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration Feature?
Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration is a new built-in feature implemented in Amazon S3. When enabled for a bucket, it speeds up data exchange with this bucket up to 6 times. Users can enable data transfer acceleration for a single S3 bucket. This option is available via standard AWS console. After that the following two modes become available for this bucket:
- accelerated uploading and downloading
- standard uploading and downloading, in case user would need the same data, but not so urgently
One can select either of these modes by means of a special endpoint domain name given to this bucket. After enabling Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration feature a new name will be generated. So, if the bucket’s initial name was mybucket.s3.amazonaws.com, the new one will be mybucket.s3-accelerate.amazonaws.com. Specifying the latter in an application, which exchanges data with this bucket, allows to speed up upload and download by 6 times.
How Does Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration Work?
Methods used to speed up data exchange between an application and a remote storage are typically referred to as networking or routing optimization. The objective is to find optimal 'routes' to transfer information faster and avoid its loss. In fact, it is better to choose those ones, which are less loaded and have higher bandwidth. Therefore, optimization requires constant analysis of networking resources in order to find out which 'path' is better at the moment.
Amazon uses its own networking resources to ensure accelerated data transfer. Its CloudFront network of edge locations places the highest priority to user sessions, which upload data to a bucket with Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration enabled. For each session an optimal route based on AWS' own backbone network is selected. AWS routing devices use special algorithms for real-time monitoring and calculation to find out quickly which route is optimal for a specific session at a certain moment.
Speeding up data transfer does not result in security level reduction. All data uploaded in the accelerated mode and in the standard mode are encrypted. Data are transferred via secure TCP and TLS protocols. Besides, these data are not stored on transit AWS edge locations, and that eliminates the risk of their leakage.<
How Much Does It Cost?
Additional charges may apply when using Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration. For accelerating data transfers IN to Amazon S3 from the Internet, prices are $ 0,04/GB for edge locations in United States, Europe or Japan and $ 0,08/GB for all other locations. For data transfers OUT of Amazon S3 and between different AWS regions the price is $ 0,04/GB for all edge locations.
Before data transfer starts, AWS automatically tests if Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration can improve data transfer speed. If not, you will be charged a regular data transfer fee.
MSP360 Supports Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration
MSP360 has been cooperating with Amazon Web Services to provide this experience to its users who need faster access to their S3 buckets. So, support of Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration feature was added to MSP360 solutions on the very day when it was released by Amazon Web Services. Moreover, it is possible to enable S3 Accelerator feature for an existing Amazon S3 bucket directly from MSP360 product’s UI. Currently, it is supported in our latest MSP360 Explorer and MSP360 Backup. You can check it out right away!
So, how do users benefit from Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration? There are three basic cases when acceleration should be considered:
- A company owning a centralized AWS bucket, which has a number of customers all over the world who constantly upload their data to it.
- A company's business flow requires transferring terabytes of data between remote regions, on a regular basis.
- A pre-paid bandwidth usually remains much underutilized when uploading data to AWS buckets
Example
Lets imagine quite a common situation when a company has a number of remote small offices in different countries or even on different continents. These branches do not generate too much data, so the company uses a single AWS bucket for data backup from each location. As a result, there are multiple weekly uploads to this bucket and in each case the traffic rate of a single upload is rather low. Enabling Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration feature for this bucket will provide the following two benefits:
- Each branch will utilize its bandwidth more efficiently
- There is little likelihood that the bucket will be overloaded with requests coming from different locations at the same time as the upload rate will be higher
- Amazon S3 storage classes and their use cases
- Pricing principles of Amazon S3
- Monthly cost estimates for Amazon S3 cloud storage and MSP360 Managed Backup – and more
