Amazon S3 Access Points vs Amazon S3 Multi-Region Access Points

Have you ever felt that as the data keep on increasing and the number of users increases it becomes complicated to manage the task?

Well, Amazon added a service called Amazon S3 Access Points which makes the task easy to manage the data among all users. Now, Let us see what is Amazon S3 Access Points and Amazon S3 Multi-Region Access Points.

Amazon S3 Access Points

Provisioning access policies (who and where to access objects) to the users could be a messy thing to do. AWS added a feature called Access Points on S3 to resolve the problem.?

With this feature, each user can have a dedicated access point on a bucket and each of these access points has its own policy. This is quite helpful when you have large data sets on a bucket that are accessed by different users. As Bucket policy can have a size of 20Kb (maximum).

With S3 Access Points, we can create unique access control policies to easily control access to shared data for different users.?

To know more about how to create S3 Access Points, click here.

When to use S3 Access Points

S3 Access Points simplify how you can manage data access for user/application sets to shared data on S3. So that you no longer have to manage complex bucket policy with 100s of different permission rules that need to be written, read, tracked, and audited.

• Provide a unique name:?It allows you to specify any name that is unique within the account and region.?
• Test new access policies:??Before migrating applications to the access point, or copying the policy to an existing access point you can easily test new access control policies.
• Restrict access to VPC:?S3 Access Point can limit all S3 storage access to happen from a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).
• Limit access to specific account IDs:?With S3 Access Points you can specify VPC Endpoint policies that permit access only to access points (and thus buckets) owned by specific account IDs.

Advantages of Amazon S3 Access Points:

S3 Access Points are Unique hostnames that you can create to enforce distinct permissions and network controls for any request via the Access Point.?

• Access Points are unique to an account and Region.
• Access Points contain a hostname, an AWS ARN and IAM resource policy.
• Access Points by default have a specific setting to Block Public Access.
• Access Points can be configured to accept requests only from a VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) to restrict Amazon S3 data access to a private network.
• Access Points can have custom IAM Permissions for a user/application.
• Access Points can have custom IAM Permissions to specific objects in a bucket.?

Amazon S3 Multi-Region Access Points?

Let's take an example you want to access the data spanning in different buckets as a single global endpoint in different AWS regions. You need this data to run an application anywhere in the world. So using the S3 Multi-Region access points will automatically route the users to the nearest bucket (which has the lowest network latency). You can also use the private link and then connect to your s3 buckets using AWS private network. In the S3 Management Console, S3 Multi-Region Access Points show a centralized view of the underlying replication metrics and your request routing configuration. This gives you an even easier way to build, manage, and monitor storage for multi-region applications.

When you should use Amazon S3 Multi-Region Access Points?

When you use an S3 Multi-Region Access Point to route requests within the AWS global network, you pay a data routing cost of $0.0033 per GB processed.

1. You might have five S3 buckets with object replication across five AWS Regions. Your application code needs to be aware of how many copies of the bucket exist and where they are located, which bucket is the closest to the caller, and how to fall back to other buckets in case of issues. In this case, you can create S3 multi-Region Access Point to route the bucket with the lowest latency.
2. AWS Global Accelerator?accelerates transfer to a single bucket using AWS private network. Users upload data to the nearest edge location and then AWS copies the data from the edge location to the bucket's location using its own network.

Final Thoughts:

S3 Access Points are very helpful if you want to provide limited access to each service/application. With Access Points all users get the same permissions using the bucket policy, if one application gets the GetObject Permissions, the other may get PutObject rights.??

While Amazon S3 Multi-Region Access Points allow you to increase resiliency and accelerate application performance up to 60% when accessing data across multiple AWS Regions.?