AWS unveils Amazon S3 Express One Zone for unique cloud storage performance

The launch takes place at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has launched Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) Express One Zone, an advanced, high-performance storage class designed to cater to customers’ needs with the most latency-sensitive applications.

Boasting the title of the lowest latency cloud object storage available, Amazon S3 Express One Zone delivers data access speeds up to 10 times faster, with request costs up to 50% lower than the widely used Amazon S3 Standard.

Amazon S3 Express One Zone was unveiled on November 28, 2023, at AWS re:Invent – a conference hosted by AWS for the global cloud computing community.

Taking place across multiple venues from November 27-December 1, 2023, in Las Vegas, Nevada, the in-person event encompasses keynote announcements, training and certification opportunities, technical sessions, and more.

Cloud storage boost

The launch of Amazon S3 Express One Zone marks a significant stride in cloud storage, offering businesses unprecedented speed, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness for their critical applications.

For customers with demanding workloads, the option to collocate their Amazon S3 Express One Zone data in the same AWS Availability Zone as their compute resources is presented. This strategic move optimises added performance and costs while boosting data processing speed.

They are recognised as the premier storage class for request-intensive operations such as machine learning (ML) training and inference, interactive analytics, and media content creation. Amazon S3 Express One Zone empowers customers to seamlessly scale their storage up or down as needed. Notably, users can continue to leverage the familiar Amazon S3 APIs they use today.

Customer expectations

James Kirschner, General Manager of Amazon S3 at AWS, said: “Millions of customers rely on Amazon S3 for everything from low-cost archival storage to petabyte-scale data lakes, and they want to expand their use to support their most performance-intensive applications where every millisecond counts.

“Amazon S3 Express One Zone delivers the fastest data access speed for the most latency-sensitive applications and enables customers to make millions of requests per minute for their highly accessed datasets while reducing request and compute costs,” Kirschner added.

Having dominated the cloud storage service arena for 17 years, Amazon S3 serves millions of customers globally across diverse industries and use cases.

Holding an impressive record with over 350 trillion objects and an average of more than 100 million requests per second, Amazon S3 has earned its reputation for industry-leading durability, availability, security, and scalability.

While Amazon S3 caters to a wide range of storage patterns, emerging use cases such as ML training and inference, interactive analytics, financial model simulations, real-time advertising, and media content creation demand even faster and more consistent response times.

This has led to the development of Amazon S3 Express One Zone, addressing the unique requirements of applications that write and access data millions of times per minute.

Customer pain points

One of the notable challenges customers face in AI and ML model training is the need to process millions of images and lines of text rapidly.

Customers often resort to moving frequently accessed data from Amazon S3 to custom caching solutions to meet the highest compute efficiency. Still, this approach introduces complexity and operational burdens and requires application modifications.

Enter Amazon S3 Express One Zone – a revolutionary storage class designed to deliver the fastest data access speed and unparalleled performance for the most latency-sensitive applications. Through purpose-built hardware and software, it provides access speeds up to 10 times shorter than Amazon S3 Standard, resulting in accelerated data processing.

Amazon S3 Express One Zone introduces a new bucket type – the Amazon S3 directory bucket to further enhance access speed and accommodate millions of requests per minute. This innovation allows customers to collocate their data in the same AWS Availability Zone as their compute resources, facilitating lower calculated costs and faster workload execution.

The impact of Amazon S3 Express One Zone is most pronounced in performance-critical applications, enabling query-intensive analytics to achieve single-digit millisecond data access speed with high durability and availability.

This translates to a significant reduction in request costs by up to 50% compared to Amazon S3 Standard and a remarkable 60% reduction in compute costs.

Data analysts, who frequently query petabytes of data, stand to benefit from Amazon S3 Express One Zone. The storage class ensures data lake queries are completed up to four times faster, expediting analytics and empowering analysts to derive insights and make decisions promptly.

With simplified management, customers can create a new Amazon S3 directory bucket with just a few clicks. Whether uploading new objects directly or copying from existing datasets in other Amazon S3 storage classes, Amazon S3 Express One Zone supports seamless operations through Amazon S3 Batch Operations in the AWS Management Console.

To add to its versatility, Amazon S3 Express One Zone supports various features, including Mountpoint for Amazon S3, Amazon S3 Server-Side Encryption, and Amazon S3 Block Public Access. Compatibility with various AWS services such as Amazon EMR, Amazon Redshift, Amazon SageMaker, and Amazon Bedrock further solidifies its position as a comprehensive solution.

Cloudera perspective

Cloudera, the data company for trusted enterprise AI, and an AWS partner, favours Amazon S3 Express One Zone, with Jim Clark, Vice President of Product Management at Cloudera, noting: “Customers use our platform to provide an open data lakehouse to get business value from all their data using AI and data analytics.

“With Amazon S3 Express One Zone’s data access speed alone, Cloudera customers can achieve up to 40% faster read and write performance, driving faster insights and value from their data. We are working to support Amazon S3 Express One Zone across Cloudera to improve performance and lower our customers’ cloud infrastructure costs,” Clark added.

Thomas Hazel, Founder and Chief Technology Officer at ChaosSearch – a leader in data analytics – said: “We already benefit from Amazon S3’s unmatched scalability, durability, availability, and security, and now it is supercharged for high-performance analytics at scale.

“With Amazon S3 Express One Zone, we get rapid time to insight with 60% faster queries and substantial cost savings through lower query costs—without any code modifications,” Hazel concluded. ChaosSearch.

Amazon S3 Express One Zone is currently available in North Virginia and Oregon in the United States, as well as Tokyo and Stockholm, with plans to expand to additional AWS regions soon.