Amazon S3

133 engineers on Hacker News describe using Amazon S3 first-hand: 22 endorse it, 9 regret it, 3 are mixed.

68%trust
133first-hand users
120in production
endorse 22mixed 3regret 9uses, no opinion

“We replaced that with an s3 bucket and mirrored _those_ to GH via actions, which had the added benefit of only failing when GitHub was down!”

endorse · production · maccard · 2026-08-17 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“Archive everything to s3, so you can rebuild it later (this has come in handy a few times).”

endorse · production · mannyv · 2025-03-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“We also serve static content from an S3 bucket and cloudfront. Nothing else to manage once its setup.”

endorse · production · hylaride · 2025-01-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“S3 is fairly cost effective.”

endorse · production · tschellenbach · 2024-11-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“its draconian pricing model for charging exuberant pricing for bandwidth is showing its age and why we've moved to Cloudflare R2”

regret · production · mythz · 2024-05-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“we moved those all onto S3 and also saw approx ~90% cost savings.”

endorse · production · kabochya · 2023-08-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“It's just a pity that storage providers won't implement transparent compression. We store our logs on S3”

regret · production · renewiltord · 2022-12-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“just yesterday we had yet another connectivity problem to S3 storage. Disks break too but it feels like connectivity issuses are much more frequent”

regret · production · kgeist · 2022-07-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“So we switched to Amazon S3 and it works much better.”

endorse · production · TrueCarry · 2021-10-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“we replaced a highly finicky way too heavyweight COTS CMS... with S3 and it ended up being way cheaper, easier and more reliable.”

endorse · production · blabitty · 2021-01-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“We would see issues where a Maven build publishes to S3, and then a downstream build would read an out-of-date maven-metadata.xml”

regret · production · HiJon89 · 2020-12-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“a deploy script to generate the HTML files and upload to AWS S3. Works perfectly.”

endorse · personal · gpnt · 2020-11-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“Thanks to S3, they do not require a sysadmin.”

endorse · personal · rabidrat · 2020-09-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I had to implement s3 presigned URLs generation as we had no access to SDKs, the documentation is littered across their website”

regret · production · Eikon · 2019-12-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I absolutely love s3 though for backups”

endorse · production · mattmanser · 2019-12-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“My company was getting massive bills on AWS S3 egress. It was one of the reasons we moved to Wasabi for bucket storage”

regret · production · griffinkelly · 2019-10-21 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I switched S3 & Cloudfront: now my bill is $0.80/month.”

endorse · personal · ordinaryperson · 2019-09-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“A postgres backend and S3 storage is most welcome and makes it very simple to manage.”

endorse · production · gldalmaso · 2018-11-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“we moved to an S3 only solution since we have such a low throughput environment and the simplicity is addictive.”

endorse · production · noobiemcfoob · 2017-12-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“Hosting static websites on S3 + CloudFront is really cheap.”

endorse · production · danieka · 2017-11-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“we turned S3 into a timeseries store that handled 100M+ messages for $10/day (over 100GB+ data, all costs for processing, storage, and backup)”

endorse · production · marknadal · 2016-12-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“Using S3 with EMR in production was breeze for us.”

endorse · production · morazow · 2016-12-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“Using S3 for the uploads solves our problems without needing EFS”

endorse · production · rmccue · 2016-11-01 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“gcs is way more responsive than S3. also, was fairly painless to migrate our S3 buckets to GCS via the web console.”

regret · production · jhgg · 2016-02-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“We store all of our images, icons and Android OBB files on Amazon S3 and sometimes our bills get totally unmanageable.”

regret · production · michaelkoz · 2015-08-03 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“generally the basic stuff like S3, SNS, SQS, Elasticache, etc just works, and doesn't require any attention.”

endorse · production · NathanKP · 2015-07-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“They are one of the few vendors we use that regularly passes on savings to us.”

endorse · production · gtaylor · 2013-11-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“maintaining this setup proved to be quite messy. Dealing with encryption and decryption was painful as well.”

regret · personal · sahaskatta · 2013-11-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“It's pretty straightforward and really cheap (S3 costs peanuts and log data gzips well). Only pain is that S3 creates a lot of files”

mixed · production · sehrope · 2013-07-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“the only problems that I ran into were invalidation and permissions on the bucket”

mixed · personal · johnbellone · 2012-12-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I cannot emphasize enough how awesome Amazon's cost cuts are. ... (Like: Recent S3 cost cuts).”

endorse · production · blantonl · 2012-12-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“S3 is good for smaller databases but for our biggest ones it takes multiple hours to download a full archive”

mixed · production · seldo · 2012-12-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“We switched to S3 about a year ago with different buckets for prod, staging, and dev”

endorse · production · 1 yr · smerritt · 2011-12-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I like the aesthetic of S3 and CF as an ultra-minimalist deployment stack.”

endorse · personal · andrewvc · 2010-11-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I've used it in production to self-host Australia-only maps on S3.”

neutral · production · Humphrey · 2025-12-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I always download precompiled binaries from trusted sources (for example, the team's S3 storage)”

neutral · production · r2vcap · 2025-12-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“you're dealing with the real SQS, S3, etc, and if you have integration problems there, they're actually real things you need to fix for it to work in prod”

neutral · production · discomrobertul8 · 2025-10-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“substitute Docker containers for RDS and MinIO for S3”

neutral · production · 18nleung · 2025-10-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“from the job orchestration with Nomad to the S3 optimizations and the Typst migration”

neutral · production · mr-karan · 2025-09-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“an older one built on top of Redis, and a newer one built on PG + S3”

neutral · production · chriscbr · 2025-08-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“Push to ECR/S3 by human.”

neutral · production · crinkly · 2025-07-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“For backups, I added a nightly cron job which exports my SQLite db to a write-only S3 bucket.”

neutral · production · normie3000 · 2025-03-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“Simply syncing SQLite files across S3 sufficed since the engine itself had a more severe write lock on indexing”

neutral · production · Moto7451 · 2025-02-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“We use AWS S3 to generate a signed url so only temporary access is enabled.”

neutral · production · tashapais25 · 2024-12-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“periodically checking S3 for an updated database, it probably is.”

neutral · production · moduspol · 2024-12-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“it's cheaper than 20k a month in S3 bills.”

neutral · production · cullenking · 2024-11-21 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“For us, we run 2 stacks. One that basically cannot/should-not be deleted/refactored. VPC, RDS, critical S3 buckets”

neutral · production · irjustin · 2024-11-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“s3 and its equivalent of flat files is what we've migrated to as a data store.”

neutral · production · mannyv · 2024-10-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“we have built a simple event system in top of lambda functions, sqs, s3, eventbridge etc”

neutral · production · fennecbutt · 2024-06-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“Previously we wrote the S3 file system, so it's not like this was our first rodeo.”

neutral · production · breckognize · 2024-06-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“99% of our workload is write heavy and is still on S3.”

neutral · production · tnolet · 2024-06-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“we make our own solution variously on platform agnostic primitives like S3 (or S3 API-compatible options)”

neutral · production · TheNewsIsHere · 2024-05-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“we use a home-grown version of this [1] to proxy large payloads to S3.”

neutral · production · 015a · 2024-05-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“When we egress from S3 to our on-prem cluster, that's a cost.”

neutral · production · renewiltord · 2023-12-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“we migrated one of our service from S3 to Cloudflare Images”

neutral · production · sailingparrot · 2023-11-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“Queue upload events via SQS, upload files to s3, scale consumers based on queue length with keda”

neutral · production · arzelaascoli · 2023-10-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“it does require a lot of metadata to orchestrate all the different concurrent operations over S3.”

neutral · production · richieartoul · 2023-08-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I had a few hundred GB of nice special-snowflake json in my S3 bucket.”

neutral · production · efxhoy · 2023-05-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“We fail with things like S3 usage, but there are alternatives we could realistically switch to”

neutral · production · bob1029 · 2023-04-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“We use partitioning across files (and folder structure in s3) to lazily scan only the bits of data we need”

neutral · production · jmartin2683 · 2022-12-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“For example: we use s3 right now, but we've built the storage server so that it can be extended”

neutral · production · kiwicopple · 2022-12-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“We migrated from S3 to Minio, an S3-compatible storage. However, we mostly store backups (6-8 TB) there”

neutral · production · chrisandchris · 2022-11-03 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“For S3, we've switched to Wasabi which very nicely uses the identical API.”

neutral · production · gibsonf1 · 2022-09-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“We switched to DO Spaces because of the lower bandwidth and storage fees.”

neutral · production · impulser_ · 2022-07-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“The jobs fetch the database from S3, update with the latest deltas and write out the database”

neutral · production · thesketh · 2022-04-25 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“backups in S3 Glacier and rsync.net”

neutral · production · mwcampbell · 2022-02-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“We use S3 for some static assets, and with layers of caching on top, I think we are rarely affected by outages.”

neutral · production · gingerlime · 2021-12-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I opted for stashing and archiving into GCS / S3 directly”

neutral · production · awill88 · 2021-12-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“a blind S3 GET of one blob, for each database”

neutral · production · pkhuong · 2021-12-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“The DB pods push their WALs to S3 and I have script to spawn a new PG from S3 using PITR.”

neutral · personal · jpgvm · 2021-10-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“We run dynamic image resizing (have a couple million image high quality originals in S3”

neutral · production · sudhirj · 2021-10-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I need to get images from S3, and write them into several formats”

neutral · production · eldavido · 2021-10-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“the long term savings to be significant versus leaving these objects in S3.”

neutral · production · corford · 2021-10-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“They wanted a queue, various different sized workers in auto-scaling group with metrics... And probably an s3 bucket.”

neutral · production · raffraffraff · 2021-10-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“We use Amazon S3 for hosting images, but we have made it easy to switch in case there will be problems”

neutral · production · pinepage · 2021-08-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“deciding how to store business data at rest on s3”

neutral · production · apendleton · 2021-05-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“S3 (Minio), and SES”

neutral · production · mozey · 2021-04-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“These are the services we used.”

neutral · production · scarface74 · 2020-12-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I started using 'aws s3 sync --delete' nowadays after having issues with pre cleanup required for 'cp'.”

neutral · production · blntechie · 2020-12-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I can copy it to our documentation aws bucket in continuous integration.”

neutral · production · erikgaas · 2020-11-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“s3 buckets used for the Lambda zip files and state”

neutral · production · lovehashbrowns · 2020-10-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“We use S3 to store de-identified data and the index to query data we have in S3”

neutral · production · P00RL3N0 · 2020-10-01 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“The main cloud services I use at work are: 1. S3/Azure Blob Store”

neutral · production · gravypod · 2020-08-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“dumps a database, encrypts it and sends it to S3 to be investigated by developers.”

neutral · production · gtsteve · 2020-08-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“shipping postgres wal logs to S3 every 10 seconds.”

neutral · production · zumachase · 2020-07-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“weights uploaded to S3. Dockerfile with a tiny little web server gets deployed”

neutral · production · FridgeSeal · 2019-11-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“ZIPs the final code to an S3 bucket.”

neutral · production · cddotdotslash · 2019-11-03 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“we do a backup of the DNS configuration on Cloudflare and save it on S3”

neutral · production · yoran · 2019-06-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“Insure that ingestion / S3 jobs were stabilized”

neutral · production · lgsilver · 2019-04-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“kinesis takes the log to s3 where it's transformed in batches with lambda then data is moved to Redshift.”

neutral · production · InGodsName · 2018-12-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“ancillary services like S3 hosting/bandwidth”

neutral · production · wild_preference · 2018-11-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“Most of the time we have to export the logs to S3, download them and do some manual grepping.”

neutral · production · djhworld · 2018-10-31 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“Backups are stored on a service we run using S3”

neutral · production · gsreenivas · 2018-10-17 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I implemented an abstraction (similar to go-cloud's) between S3 and GCS because of that”

neutral · production · fishywang · 2018-07-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“the standard auxiliary services like CW, SNS, Route53, S3, CF, X-Ray, etc.”

neutral · production · 1.5 yr · not_kurt_godel · 2018-06-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“(+S3+Cloudfront for web page hosting)”

neutral · production · adzicg · 2018-02-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“In real applications we need to use social login, share, google maps, shopify buy SDK, S3, Azure speech API and so on.”

neutral · production · ix-hispana · 2017-12-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“we use SQS to listen for S3 events and would love to switch to AMQ”

neutral · production · binarymax · 2017-11-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“Yes, we had downtime when S3 died last year. So did half the Internet.”

neutral · production · twobyfour · 2017-10-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“name of backup S3 bucket for services in dev environment”

neutral · production · howinator · 2017-08-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“we harvest these Redis Strings into object storage (both NAS and S3 endpoints) with Postgres storing the metadata”

neutral · production · neomantra · 2017-07-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“From there it is a nightly cron to rsync select directories in own cloud to S3.”

neutral · personal · twothamendment · 2016-11-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“We were using it for parallel file processing (S3->lambda for CPU-heavy task->return a few numbers in a JSON).”

neutral · production · zbjornson · 2016-11-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“When we switched from Amazon S3 to b2, we lost the ability to do signed requests”

neutral · production · erichocean · 2016-08-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“we have 11 or so S3 buckets that back Cloudfront distributions for static content”

neutral · production · themartorana · 2016-06-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“All assets are also uploaded to S3.”

neutral · production · bikamonki · 2016-05-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“reducing overall costs for AWS S3 traffic.”

neutral · production · iagooar · 2015-12-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“that fact is dumped onto an S3 bucket, somewhere.”

neutral · production · patio11 · 2015-08-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“Images are hosted on Amazon S3, we also queue uploads to S3 with SQS.”

neutral · production · Idered · 2015-07-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“we keep the values (files AND environment variables) in S3 and download them at deploy time”

neutral · production · grhmc · 2015-07-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“AWS S3 for static storage + Route 53 for static websites”

neutral · production · bikamonki · 2015-02-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“The grunt-aws module makes deploying to S3 and cloudfront a breeze.”

neutral · production · thoughtpalette · 2015-01-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“We've never needed to restore a node from an s3 backup in 5 years of running in production.”

neutral · production · 5 yr · helper · 2015-01-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“my service connects to S3 to store/retrieve files. The access key, secret key and even the bucket name are all passed as ENV variables”

neutral · personal · 0.02 yr · Khao · 2014-12-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“We use an S3-backed private docker registry to store our images/repositories.”

neutral · production · peteridah · 2014-10-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“Guide images are pushed to S3 by Celery”

neutral · production · tomkinstinch · 2014-05-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“set up an S3 bucket as a "local" pip mirror for our EC2 infrastructure”

neutral · production · themartorana · 2014-01-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“raw user events (collected in S3 from web, Lua, Arduino etc clients)”

neutral · production · alexatkeplar · 2013-11-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“encrypt all of my personal files before I back them up to S3/dropbox/whatever”

neutral · personal · jlgreco · 2012-12-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I had been using jekyll for a while. Then I decided to piece together how to replicate what the obama campaign did using s3 and cloudfront”

neutral · personal · sudonim · 2012-12-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“ended up using node to handle file uploads, validations, image processing, S3 storage and video encoding”

neutral · production · mickeyben · 2012-09-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“we just do an S3 base backup of our entire data (which uploads at 65 MB/s from within EC2) fairly infrequently”

neutral · production · mitchellh · 2012-04-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“In Rails I use the s3_swf_upload gem to allow folks to upload directly to our S3 buckets.”

neutral · production · aculver · 2011-12-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“We use S3 to store the raw documents, but CouchDB for the metadata and the results of our algorithms.”

neutral · production · dem · 2011-11-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“* File Hosting: S3”

neutral · production · spatten · 2011-11-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“We log everything to files on local storage. Then we use a command line tool to periodically sync these to S3. Each instance gets its own folder.”

neutral · production · sehugg · 2011-10-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“a Rails app I built to track documents (Stored on S3) associated with machines in production”

neutral · production · kerryfalk · 2011-09-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“There's a separate management script that pushes the renamed files to S3 - I run that before doing a deploy.”

neutral · production · simonw · 2011-08-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“we switched everything over to S3. Everything should be much faster now.”

neutral · production · axylone · 2011-03-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“We push original high resolution versions of photos/graphics to S3.”

neutral · production · roachsocal · 2010-12-21 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I'm using it with the S3 backend.”

neutral · personal · 1 yr · bartman · 2010-11-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I've even started using it on two of my own personal servers, storing encrypted backups on Amazon S3.”

neutral · personal · RyanGWU82 · 2010-11-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“And there is meta data extraction and uploading to S3.”

neutral · production · felixge · 2010-07-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?