Lesson Seventeen

In this video, we’re going to cover managing your Amazon S3 files using your AWS management console.

Go ahead and log in to your AWS console and over here on the left click on the S3 icon. That will bring us to the page where all of our buckets are. Speaking of buckets, one thing that we have not touched on related to buckets and the AWS console, is the lifecycle or sending the bucket and/or the objects within that bucket to the glacier storage class, the cold storage, or having it automatically delete itself at a specified time in the future.

To do that, you want to go ahead and select the bucket. Come on over here to properties. And along with adjusting permissions or making this a static website, hosting portal or initiating logging or notifications or versioning or even adding tags, which comes in pretty handy especially if you’re monitoring the billing, you’ve got the lifecycle. And you can just hit this arrow to the left to expand that and then click on ‘add rule’ and you can decide here if you want the entire bucket to follow this rule or a portion of the bucket, the objects. If you click on this, you’re going to get these instructions here on what to do to designate particular objects within that bucket. Let’s go with the entire bucket.

Come on down here on the lower right. Click on configure rule. Actions on the objects, do nothing is default. You can ‘archive it only’ meaning you can send it off to cold storage or ‘delete it only’ or a little bit of both. If you do a little bit of both, you can even click on this ‘see an example’ here to give you an idea as to how this all works; makes it real simple. For example on the archive to glacier, you can send it to the archive say 30 days after this was created and then you can permanently delete it from the archives or from AWS altogether, 30 days after this. This would be 60 days and this would be 30 days just like it’s showing down here.

And then once you put the dates in here, come on down here and click on review and here you have a chance to edit either of those options. Give it a name. If you don’t, then like it says here AWS will, and then click on create and activate rule. Simple Simon. And if you no longer want this rule to take place, then remove this checkmark from the box titled enabled.

That’s one of the things about the buckets. As far as the permissions with the buckets, as I’ve stated before, you really do not want to adjust the default private permissions unless for example you’re trying to transfer objects from your bucket to another bucket on somebody else S3 account, in which case you might want to go ahead and adjust temporarily or add temporarily more permissions, allowing that transfer to take place. I’ll cover that in greater detail in an upcoming video, but for the time being we’re just going to go ahead and leave the permissions at the default private setting. Let’s go ahead and get on out of here and check out some things about the objects.

Like with the third party tools, there’s a lot that you can do here with the individual objects and the folders. Basically copying, moving and renaming, as well as deleting, are the items that will be taking place more times than not, and how you would do that is you would select the individual item. You have the ability to get the URL right here under the properties. You can change the permissions from the default private to maybe making it public so that you can put this image on a website because that would definitely load faster than this image that is hosted on a shared hosting site for example, especially if there’s a lot of load on that website at the same time.

And you would do that by just clicking on add more permissions, clicking this grantee down arrow button, clicking on everyone, then open and download and then click on save. That allows this link right here to be active. For example if I just left click on this right now, it will open up that image in a browser but if we come on back here and remove these permissions then click on save, and now if we click on this URL we’re going to get access denied because the permissions were taken away from that being viewed anywhere else besides this location right here.

We can get around that by coming over here in the left panel and right clicking and then left clicking on open, because doing this AWS will automatically create an expiring or signed URL for I believe it’s 5 minute in length. We can do that by just clicking on open. Boom, that fast. AWS has generated a time-expiring URL. That’s all this gibberish right in here. And if we come on back here and refresh this in say 5 minutes and 10 seconds, we’re going to get that access denied message because it’s only going to be good for 5 minutes.

Now if you wanted to move this or copy this or delete this or rename this, all you have to do is just right click on this and we have the options here or with that object selected, then come on up here to the actions button and hit that dropdown arrow, then we have similar options right here. You don’t see the feature called ‘move’ only copy, delete and rename. Move is the same thing as cut, so if we were to cut this then it’s going to remove it from this source location and paste it in the destination location. For example if we go with copy, it’s just copy that object into my clipboard and if we come on back here to a different bucket and then right click and then left click on paste, you get the transfer notices over here and there it is right there. If we want to clear this up automatically, you can check this box or you can just right click on this element and then clear or if there’s a bunch of them over here, clear, finished, failed transfers, it will take care of all of them in one full sweep.

If we select the object, come on back to properties and if we wanted to add, remove or edit existing metadata, right here is where you do that. Again it’s under properties after you select that actual object itself. Now while there’s a tone more we can do with managing of the files within the AWS console, we’ve covered the basics here in this video and if you need more information on how to manage additional features of your buckets and objects within the AWS console, then you can check out the documents for Amazon S3 within AWS.

And you can find them over here under help, documentation and then come on down to Amazon S3 and then pick your poison.

And that’s going to bring us to the end of this video on managing your files within your AWS console. Thanks for watching and you have a great day.