Why Use Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration?

You might want to use Transfer Acceleration on a bucket for various reasons, including the following:

• 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.

For more information about when to use Transfer Acceleration, see Amazon S3 FAQs.

Using the Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration Speed Comparison Tool

You can use the Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration Speed Comparison tool to compare accelerated and non-accelerated upload speeds across Amazon S3 regions. The Speed Comparison tool uses multipart uploads to transfer a file from your browser to various Amazon S3 regions with and without using Transfer Acceleration.

You can access the Speed Comparison tool using either of the following methods:

• Copy the following URL into your browser window, replacing region with the region that you are using (for example, us-west-2) and yourBucketName with the name of the bucket that you want to evaluate:https://s3-accelerate-speedtest.s3-accelerate.amazonaws.com/en/accelerate-speed-comparsion.html?region=region&origBucketName=yourBucketName For a list of the regions supported by Amazon S3, see Regions and Endpoints in the Amazon Web Services General Reference.
• Use the Amazon S3 console. For details, see Enabling Transfer Acceleration in the Amazon Simple Storage Service Console User Guide.

Getting Started with Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration

To get started using Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration, perform the following steps:

1. Enable Transfer Acceleration on a bucket – For your bucket to work with transfer acceleration, the bucket name must conform to DNS naming requirements and must not contain periods (“.”).You can enable Transfer Acceleration on a bucket any of the following ways:
   • Use the Amazon S3 console. For more information, see Enabling Transfer Acceleration in the Amazon Simple Storage Service Console User Guide.
   • Use the REST API PUT Bucket accelerate operation.
   • Use the AWS CLI and AWS SDKs. For more information, see Using the AWS SDKs, CLI, and Explorers.
2. Transfer data to and from the acceleration-enabled bucket by using one of the following s3-accelerate endpoint domain names:
   • bucketname.s3-accelerate.amazonaws.com – to access an acceleration-enabled bucket.
   • bucketname.s3-accelerate.dualstack.amazonaws.com – to access an acceleration-enabled bucket over IPv6. Amazon S3 dual-stack endpoints support requests to S3 buckets over IPv6 and IPv4. The Transfer Acceleration dual-stack endpoint only uses the virtual hosted-style type of endpoint name. For more information, see Getting started making requests over IPv6 and Using Amazon S3 dual-stack endpoints.ImportantSupport for the dual-stack accelerated endpoint currently is only available from the AWS Java SDK. Support for the AWS CLI and other AWS SDKs is coming soon.NoteYou can continue to use the regular endpoint in addition to the accelerate endpoints.You can point your Amazon S3 PUT object and GET object requests to the s3-accelerate endpoint domain name after you enable Transfer Acceleration. For example, let’s say you currently have a REST API application using PUT Object that uses the host name mybucket.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com in the PUT request. To accelerate the PUT you simply change the host name in your request to mybucket.s3-accelerate.amazonaws.com. To go back to using the standard upload speed, simply change the name back to mybucket.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com.After Transfer Acceleration is enabled, it can take up to 20 minutes for you to realize the performance benefit. However, the accelerate endpoint will be available as soon as you enable Transfer Acceleration.You can use the accelerate endpoint in the AWS CLI, AWS SDKs, and other tools that transfer data to and from Amazon S3. If you are using the AWS SDKs, some of the supported languages use an accelerate endpoint client configuration flag so you don’t need to explicitly set the endpoint for Transfer Acceleration to bucketname.s3-accelerate.amazonaws.com. For examples of how to use an accelerate endpoint client configuration flag, see Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration Examples.

You can use all of the Amazon S3 operations through the transfer acceleration endpoints, except for the following the operations: GET Service (list buckets), PUT Bucket (create bucket), and DELETE Bucket. Also, Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration does not support cross region copies using PUT Object – Copy.

Requirements for Using Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration

The following are the requirements for using Transfer Acceleration on an S3 bucket:

• Transfer Acceleration is only supported on virtual style requests. For more information about virtual style requests, see Making requests using the REST API.
• The name of the bucket used for Transfer Acceleration must be DNS-compliant and must not contain periods (“.”).
• Transfer Acceleration must be enabled on the bucket. After enabling Transfer Acceleration on a bucket it might take up to 20 minutes before the data transfer speed to the bucket increases.
• To access the bucket that is enabled for Transfer Acceleration, you must use the endpoint bucketname.s3-accelerate.amazonaws.com. or the dual-stack endpoint bucketname.s3-accelerate.dualstack.amazonaws.com to connect to the enabled bucket over IPv6.
• You must be the bucket owner to set the transfer acceleration state. The bucket owner can assign permissions to other users to allow them to set the acceleration state on a bucket. The s3:PutAccelerateConfiguration permission permits users to enable or disable Transfer Acceleration on a bucket. The s3:GetAccelerateConfiguration permission permits users to return the Transfer Acceleration state of a bucket, which is either Enabled or Suspended. For more information about these permissions, see Example — Bucket Subresource Operations and Identity and access management in Amazon S3.