??? There is no web interface to create objects; the only full mode of access is
through the API.
??? It is generally agreed that the S3 API is the first large public API that calls itself
RESTful and actually lives up to the principles of REST.
??? In addition to the rich HTTPweb service interface, S3 can serve objects over
plain HTTP(without any custom HTTPheaders) and BitTorrent. Many organizations
use S3 as a storage network for their static content because it can serve
images, CSS, and JavaScript just as well as a standard web server.
The full documentation for the S3 API is at http://aws.amazon.com/s3. We will now
look into the basic architecture of S3, its concepts, and its set of operations.
Concepts and Terminology
S3 is used to store objects, which are streams of data with a key (a name) and
attached metadata. They are like files in many ways. Objects are stored in buckets,
which also have a key. Buckets are like filesystem directories, with a few differences:
??? Bucket names must be unique across the entire S3 system. You cannot pick a
bucket name that has already been chosen by someone else.
??? Bucket names must be valid DNS names (alphanumeric plus underscore, period,
and dash).
232 | Chapter 7: REST, Resources, and Web Services
??? Buckets cannot be nested. There is one level of buckets, which contain objects.
However, we can fake such nesting by giving objects keys like blog/2007/01/05/
index.
Pages:
338
339
340
341
342
343
344
345
346
347
348
349
350
351
352
353
354
355
356
357
358
359
360
361
362