AWS — Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration Overview

Introduction to AWS S3 Transfer Acceleration

TL;DR:

Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration enables fast, easy, and secure transfers of files over long distances between your client and an S3 bucket. Transfer Acceleration takes advantage of Amazon CloudFront’s globally distributed edge locations.

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.

S3 Transfer Acceleration reduces the variability in Internet routing, congestion and speeds that can affect transfers, and logically shortens the distance to S3 for remote applications.

Instead of directly uploading the file to S3 bucket, you will get a distinct URL that will upload the data to the nearest edge location which in turn transfer the file to S3 bucket. The edge location will then send the file up to the S3 bucket. Therefore, we can say that Amazon optimizes the process by using the Transfer Acceleration service.

Transfer Acceleration URL would look like:
<BUCKETNAME>.s3-accelerate.amazonaws.com

Why use Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration

• You have customers that upload to a centralized bucket from all over the world.
• You transfer gigabytes to terabytes of data on a regular basis across continents.
• You are unable to utilize all of your available bandwidth over the Internet when uploading to Amazon S3.

Benefits of Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration

• Move data faster over long distances
• Reduce network variability
• Shorten the distance to S3
• Maximize bandwidth utilization

Notes

Transfer Acceleration cannot be disabled, and can only be suspended.