Amazon S3
Object storage for arbitrary files, addressed by bucket and key. The default durable landing place for uploads, backups and static assets on AWS.
Limits
A single PUT operation can upload an object up to 5 GB; anything larger requires multipart upload
Multipart upload supports a single object from 5 MB up to 50 TB
Uploads through the S3 console are limited to 160 GB per file
Event notifications are delivered at least once and are not guaranteed to arrive in the order the events occurred, so consumers must tolerate duplicates and reordering
Pricing model
Per-GB-month of stored data by storage class, plus per-request charges that differ for PUT/COPY/POST/LIST versus GET, plus data transfer out to the internet. Requests are often the surprise on small-object workloads.
Cross-provider equivalents
- Google Cloud Storage
How it differs: A single Cloud Storage object caps at 5 TiB, whereas an S3 object uploaded via multipart reaches 50 TB — roughly a 10x difference that decides whether large media masters or database snapshots can be stored as one object at all.
- Azure Blob Storage
How it differs: An Azure block blob reaches about 190.7 TiB (50,000 blocks x 4,000 MiB), far above S3's 50 TB, but a single Put Blob write is capped at 5,000 MiB against S3's 5 GB single PUT — so Azure holds larger objects while both force chunking at a similar per-request size.