Amazon S3 was Amazon Web Services’ first publicly available product, launched in 2006.
Amazon Simple Storage Service, abbreviated Amazon S3, launched on March 14, 2006. It allowed developers to store and retrieve data through the internet instead of maintaining all storage hardware themselves.
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2, followed later in 2006 and provided scalable virtual computing capacity. Together, S3 and EC2 helped establish Amazon Web Services as a major cloud-computing platform and eventually became an important part of Amazon’s business.
S3 is often confused with a conventional file-storage service. It is an object-storage system, meaning data is stored as objects inside containers called buckets. The service is separate from Amazon’s retail marketplace, although both belong to Amazon.com, Inc.