S3 Transfer Acceleration

Faster long-distance S3 uploads & downloads

Get started with Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration

Overview

Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration can speed up content transfers to and from Amazon S3 by as much as 50-500% for long-distance transfer of larger objects. Customers who have either web or mobile applications with widespread users or applications hosted far away from their S3 bucket can experience long and variable upload and download speeds over the Internet. S3 Transfer Acceleration (S3TA) reduces the variability in Internet routing, congestion and speeds that can affect transfers, and logically shortens the distance to S3 for remote applications. S3TA improves transfer performance by routing traffic through Amazon CloudFront’s globally distributed Edge Locations and over AWS backbone networks, and by using network protocol optimizations. You can turn on S3TA with a few clicks in the S3 console, and test its benefits from your location with a speed comparison tool. With S3TA, you pay only for transfers that are accelerated.

Benefits

S3TA can accelerate long-distance transfers to and from your Amazon S3 buckets. The longer the distance between your client application (mobile, web application, or upload tool) and the target S3 bucket, the more S3TA can help. And if S3TA would not accelerate a transfer, you are not charged.

For applications interacting with your S3 buckets through the S3 API from outside of your bucket’s region, S3TA helps avoid the variability in Internet routing and congestion. It does this by routing your uploads and downloads over the AWS global network infrastructure, so you get the benefit of our network optimizations.

S3TA shortens the distance between client applications and AWS servers that acknowledge PUTS and GETS to Amazon S3 using our global network of hundreds of CloudFront Edge Locations. We automatically route your uploads and downloads through the closest Edge Locations to your application.

S3TA on average fully utilizes your bandwidth for transfers, and minimizes the effect of distance on throughput. This helps to ensure consistently fast performance to Amazon S3 regardless of your client’s location.

Use cases

Many customers develop mobile or web applications that feature file uploads to S3. When these applications have users that are far from the destination S3 bucket, uploads and downloads may be slow. S3TA can help speed up these long-distance transfers to provide users a better experience. 

IT infrastructure teams and line-of-business teams have on-premises applications in distributed locations that use the S3 API to store files, lab imagery or media in a centralized bucket. S3TA can help speed up such time-sensitive transfers over long distances.

Companies who engage in research and development projects often generate large quantities of data. They may collaborate with universities, hospitals, think tanks or even peer companies. For sharing of large data sets between companies, customers can set up special access to their S3 buckets with accelerated uploads to speed data exchanges and the pace of innovation.