Amazon Web Services has made Amazon S3 Metadata generally available following its introduction in preview at the company’s re:Invent 2024 conference in Las Vegas.
Amazon describes S3 Metadata as the “easiest and fastest way” to discover and understand S3 data, with automated and easily queried metadata that’s updated in “near real time”. It promises to “simplify” business analytics, real-time inference applications, and other areas.
The technology supports object metadata, which includes system-defined details like size and source of the object, and custom metadata, which allows users to apply tags to annotate their objects with information like product SKU, transaction ID, or content rating.
S3 Metadata automatically captures metadata from objects as they are uploaded into a bucket and makes that metadata queryable in a read-only table.
As data in the bucket changes, S3 Metadata updates the table “within minutes” to reflect the latest changes. These metadata tables are stored in S3 Tables, storage optimized for tabular data. The S3 Tables integration with AWS Glue Data Catalog is in preview, allowing companies to stream, query, and visualize data – including S3 Metadata tables – using AWS analytics services such as Amazon Athena, Amazon Data Firehose, Amazon EMR, Amazon QuickSight, and Amazon Redshift.
Additionally, S3 Metadata integrates with Amazon Bedrock, allowing for the annotation of AI-generated videos with metadata that specifies its AI origin, creation timestamp, and the specific model used for its generation.
AWS says S3 Metadata is currently available in a number of AWS regions, including US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), and US West (Oregon).
As for S3 pricing, you pay for storing objects in your S3 buckets. The rate you are charged depends on your objects’ size, how long the objects are stored during the month, and the storage class, such as S3 Standard, S3 Intelligent-Tiering, S3 Standard-Infrequent Access, S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access, and S3 Express One Zone, for instance.
