Hello and welcome to this lecture covering how you can speed up your long-distance S3 data transfers using Transfer Acceleration.

When transferring data into or out of Amazon S3 from and to your remote client, or to another AWS region, transfer acceleration can dramatically speed up the process by utilizing another AWS service, Amazon CloudFront.

Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery network service (CDN), which essentially provides a means of distributing traffic worldwide via edge locations. AWS edge locations are sites deployed in major cities and highly populated areas across the globe. More information on Amazon CloudFront can be found in our existing course here.

When transferring data to S3 from your client with transfer acceleration enabled at the bucket level, the request will go via one of the CloudFront Edge Locations, from here the transfer request will then be routed through a high speed optimized AWS network path to Amazon S3.

When using transfer acceleration you should be aware that there is a cost. Whereas normal data transfer into amazon S3 is free from the internet, with transfer acceleration, this is a cost associated per GB depending on which edge location is used. Also, there is an increased cost for any data transferred OUT of S3, either to the internet or to another Region, again due to the edge location acceleration involved.

To enable transfer acceleration is very simple to do. Select your bucket within the S3 console, select ‘Properties’ and then select the Transfer Acceleration tile.

You can then either ‘Enable’ it or ‘Suspend’ as required. You will also notice that you will be given an Endpoint, in this case, the endpoint for the bucket is as shown.

As a result, to enable transfer acceleration your bucket name must be DNS compliant and not contain any periods at all. Also, to make use of the transfer acceleration feature itself, any requests, such as GET or PUT to the bucket, must use this new transfer acceleration endpoint.

One final point to make with transfer acceleration is that there are a couple of S3 operations that it does not support, these being: GET Service (list buckets), PUT Bucket (create bucket), DELETE Bucket, and Cross region copies using PUT Object - Copy.