AWS launches S3 Express One Zone, promises 10x write speed improvement

At its annual re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, Amazon AWS cloud arm today announced a major update to its S3 object storage service: AWS S3 Express One Zone, a new high-performance and low latency tier for S3. The company promises that Express One Zone offers a 10x performance improvement over the standard S3 service.

One Zone, AWS says, will offer a major performance improvement for data-intensive applications, including AI/ML training, financial modeling and high-performance computing. And while it can easily handle any size of object, AWS notes that thanks to its low-latency access, it works especially well for use cases where applications have to access very large amounts of small files. One Zone can read these small objects up to 10x faster compared to S3 Standard.

On the pricing front, AWS promises 50% lower request cost.

In the backend, AWS is making some very specific changes to enable these capabilities, including a new bucket type and authentication model to access them, as well as a slightly different naming scheme.

The new S3 Express One Zone tier is now generally available.