# Amazon S3

> No complaints. Storage, data lake, archive.

- Verdict: My default
- Vendor: AWS
- Layer: [Storage and delivery](https://cloudlesslabs.com/stack/layers/storage.md). Job: Object storage
- Last reviewed: 18 October 2026, by Nicolas Dao (Cloudless Labs, Sydney)
- Web page: https://cloudlesslabs.com/stack/aws-s3/. The whole stack in one file: https://cloudlesslabs.com/stack/brief.md

The most reliable thing in AWS. My only issue is egress, and that's a CDN decision.

## Use it when

- Everything stored and processed inside AWS: uploads, data lakes, backups, logs.

## Don't use it when

- Serving large public files to the internet at volume: egress dominates. Use Cloudflare R2 or a CloudFront flat-rate plan.

## Pricing

Sydney: $0.025/GB-month (Standard). Internet egress $0.114/GB (first 10 TB): that's where it hurts.

## Provisioning

Official Pulumi package · Official Terraform provider

## Instead, consider

- [Cloudflare R2](https://cloudlesslabs.com/stack/cloudflare-r2/index.md): Public, high-egress content.

## Worked examples

- [A live auction on Durable Objects](https://cloudlesslabs.com/stack/guides/live-auction/index.md): How do thousands of bidders share one live auction without races, and what happens when it ends?
- [CloudWatch and Firehose, side by side](https://cloudlesslabs.com/stack/guides/chatty-logs/index.md): How do I keep chatty logs without a CloudWatch-sized bill?
- [Athena or DuckDB?](https://cloudlesslabs.com/stack/guides/data-lake/index.md): How should I query my data lake, and what changed when AWS bought DuckDB's company?

## Where it fits

- [Something live that many people watch at once](https://cloudlesslabs.com/stack/use-cases/realtime.md): pick 4. The archive. Bid logs and history as Parquet for analytics.
- [A data lake](https://cloudlesslabs.com/stack/use-cases/data-lake.md): pick 1. The lake. Parquet (Iceberg next), partitioned by date and sorted by your second key.

## Sources

- [S3 pricing](https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/)

## Related

- [Storage and delivery](https://cloudlesslabs.com/stack/layers/storage.md): every tool in this layer, with its verdict
- [The whole stack in one file](https://cloudlesslabs.com/stack/brief.md): every use case and tool, for questions that span many
- [Map of every Markdown file on cloudlesslabs.com, with what each one answers](https://ask.cloudlesslabs.com)