Lesson Five

One of the key elements required to use your Amazon S3 service is the bucket. The S3 bucket is like any other bucket, in that it holds stuff. Now in the case of your S3 buckets it holds the objects of the folders and files that you upload into it. This video is going to show you how to create your buckets and a few things that you should consider along the way, like best practices and certain naming conventions.

To tackle this, let’s go ahead and head on over to our newly created S3 account or AWS account and to do that we need to go to AWS.Amazon.com and over here on the top right corner hover over my account/console and in this dropdown click on my account. If you have not recently logged in, then you’ll be presented with a log in page where you have to put in the email address and the password you need to log in to your AWS account. Then once logged in, come on up here on the top left corner and click on this little cube thingy. That’s going to take you to the console. Once on the console, you want to come on down here on the left and click on the S3 icon to get us to the S3 page and that’s going to bring us back to the page where we left off at in the prior video.

Once you have your first bucket created, you’re not going to see this page anymore. Instead, you’ll see the page that actually has your different buckets and the blue create bucket button will be up here in the top left corner.

A couple of things to know about creating your buckets – first off you have to decide on the region that you want the bucket to be hosted in or housed in. If you recall in a prior video I talked briefly about the different regions, there’s like 8 or 9 of them. Well the reason why you would want a particular bucket in a particular region is because it does transfer your files to your customers a lot quicker if the bucket is located in the same region as your customers. Whatever region of the world the majority of your customers are in, that’s the region that you should have that particular bucket in and the cost does adjust accordingly. To speed the process up and to be a little cheaper, make sure that the bucket is located in the region where a majority of your customers are at. That’s the first thing you want to consider, the region.

As far as the actual naming of the bucket, you have to have between 3 to 63 characters and those characters need to be lowercase letters, at least 1, numbers, a period or a hyphen or a dash, so alphanumeric, periods, dashes, no special characters, no underscores and yeah you can get away with that if you’re using one of the US regions but since those are what’s called non DNS compliant bucket names, it may not work across the board. It’s better just to kind of keep things standardize and just stick with the 3 – 63 characters, lowercase letters (at least one), numbers, periods or dots and hyphens or dashes.

You may also consider creating bucket names that match any domain names that you have. For example if you have a domain name mysite.com, you might want to name one of your buckets www.mysite.com and if you are considering that, then you might want to go ahead and do that as soon as possible because like domain names, there are no 2 bucket names alike throughout the entire AWS system. Once somebody has a bucket name, nobody else can have that.

You might want to consider that whenever deciding what your first bucket name is going to be, hey maybe it might be yourname.com or your name as a bucket name. Chances are bucket names like John Smith have already been taken, so you might not even want to bother with that.

Another thing you might want to consider is that you’re already allowed 100 buckets per S3 account. Just starting off, that might not mean a whole heck of a lot to you but after a year or so it might. You can have multiple S3 accounts so that limit’s really not that big of a deal but just know that you are limited to 100 buckets per S3 account.

Let’s go ahead and create a bucket. Come on over here and click on the blue create bucket button. Let’s go ahead and choose a region first. I’m going to go ahead and stick with US standard. At this point go and click on create and here’s my bucket. By the way, while you are naming your bucket, if it’s a bucket that will not work for whatever reason, maybe because you’ve put in a .. or no letters or whatever, you’re going to get an error telling you what the problem is.

As far as adding objects to this bucket, click on the bucket, click on create folder if you like or if you want to go ahead and just upload an object directly into this bucket, click on actions and click on upload. You can also create a folder from the dropdown here as well. You’ve got these tabs over here where you can check out the properties. Of course there’s nothing in there right now but for the bucket itself you can adjust the permissions. You can actually create a static website. Here’s the logging. This gives you a little bit of a rundown on the bucket itself and feel free to poke around on the rest of the console area here just to get more familiarized with some of the information available to you.

On the next several videos, I’m going to demonstrate various third-party tools that allow you to upload, download, delete and manage your files and folders between your computer and your S3 buckets. That’s going to bring us to the of this video on Amazon S3 buckets. Thanks for watching and you have a great day.