New Amazon S3 Express One Zone promises 10x performance boost

AWS has unveiled its new Amazon S3 Express One Zone storage offering, promising marked performance and speed improvements on its standard edition. 

CEO Adam Selipsky revealed the move during his keynote address at the annual AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas today alongside a slew of product updates which included the launch of its ‘Amazon Q’ generative AI assistant.

Selipsky told attendees that One Zone represents the next iteration of the popular cloud storage offering, which is 17 years old at this stage.

The new high-performance, low-latency storage class offers a 10x improvement on data access speeds in addition to a 50% lower request cost compared to Amazon S3 standard.

This equates to single-digit millisecond data access for customers.

The update comes amid a period of intense ML and AI-related workload demands from customers, the company said in a statement.

“Amazon S3 Express One Zone is the most performant storage class for request-intensive operations such as machine learning (ML) training and inference, interactive analytics, and media content creation,” the firm said in a statement.

Amazon S3 Express One Zone is tailor-made for AI 

Focusing heavily on supporting intensive AI workload capacities, AWS confirmed the launch of a new bucket type, dubbed an Amazon S3 directory bucket.

The cloud giant said customers will be able to create new directory buckets “with just a few clicks”, allowing them to upload new objects directly or copy objects from existing datasets in other S3 storage classes.

Traditionally, customers have been able to choose specific AWS Regions to store S3 data. However, the latest update also means users can now choose to co-locate One Zone data in the same availability zone as compute resources.

AWS said this will help “lower compute costs and run workloads faster”.

“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,” said James Kirschner, GM for Amazon S3 at AWS.

“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 also reducing request and compute costs.”

The announcement marks the latest major update to Amazon S3 in recent years and underlines the continued longevity – and popularity – of the service.

In 2021, the tech giant added S3 Object Lambda, a service which enabled users to add their own proprietary code to process data retrieval from buckets before it is returned to an application.

2021 also saw the addition of the S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval function, also unveiled at its re:Invent conference.

The archive storage class offered low-cost storage for older datasets that are typically not accessed.