Is there a benefit to using multiple buckets on Amazon S3 versus consolidating into a single bucket?

Question

We currently serve up downloadable content (mp3, pdf, mp4, zip files, etc) in a single S3 bucket called media.domainname.com.

We have a separate bucket that stores all the various video encodings for our iOS app: app.domainname.com.

We're investigating moving all of our images to S3 as well in order to ease the server load and prep us for moving to a load balanced server setup.

That said, is it better/more efficient to move our images to a separate bucket i.e., images.domainname.com? Or is it a better practice to create an images subfolder in the media bucket, like media.domainname.com/images?

What are the pros/cons of either method?

Answer 1

The primary benefits of using separate buckets are that you can assign separate policies to each:

• Reduced redundancy to save on costs.
• Versioning of changed contents.
• Automatic archival to Glacier
• Separate permissions

The only downside that I can think of is that it means you'd have to manage all these things separately across multiple buckets.