What is Amazon Transfer Acceleration - Key features

It is a service facilitated by Amazed that helps in quick, easy and secure transfer of files between one client and an S3 bucket. The distance between the client and S3 is usually large. Transfer Acceleration leverages Amazon’s CloudFront’s globally distributed edge locations to transfer files quickly. When data arrives to an edge location, it is routed to the Amazon S3 service via an optimized network path. When Transfer acceleration service is used, extra charges are incurred by the user.  

Features of Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration

• Customer/User gets the ability to upload data to a centralized data bucket from anywhere in the world. 
• Data transferred can range from anywhere between gigabytes to terabytes, and such data can be transferred on a regular basis across continents.  
• When data is uploaded to S3, all of the available bandwidth present over the Internet can’t be utilized, hence Transfer Acceleration comes to play.  

Enabling transfer acceleration on a bucket

For the S3 bucket to work hand in hand with transfer acceleration, the bucket name must adhere to the DNS naming rules and should not contain periods (‘.’). 

Transfer acceleration can be enabled on an S3 bucket in any of the below ways: 

1. Go to the Amazon S3 Console, and click on the bucket name for which you wish to enable the transfer acceleration. Click on the ‘properties’ and choose ‘Transfer acceleration’. Choose ‘Enabled’ and click on ‘Save’.  
2. REST API can be used to enable transfer acceleration,  
3. AWS CLI and AWS SDK can be used to enable transfer acceleration.  

Requirements to use Transfer Acceleration

• Transfer acceleration can be supported on virtual type of requests only.
• The name of the S3 bucket used for transfer acceleration should comply with DNS rules and should not contain periods (‘.’).
• Transfer acceleration enabled on a bucket takes about 20 minutes to reflect the speed during data transfer.
• The endpoint name or the dual stack endpoint name has to be used to access the bucket which is enabled for transfer acceleration normally or over IPV6 respectively.  
• The transfer acceleration on a bucket can be set by the user who is the owner of the bucket only. The bucket owner has the ability to grant permissions to other users so that they get the ability to grant permission to enable transfer acceleration on a S3 bucket.  

The GET operation can be implemented to return the transfer acceleration state of an S3 bucket. To implement GET, the user should have appropriate permissions and the transfer acceleration for that bucket has to be enabled, otherwise no state is returned.  

The PUT operation can be implemented to set the accelerate configuration for an existing S3 bucket. The permission to perform this operation is enabled by default for the user. This permission can be granted by the owner of the bucket to other users as well.  

The transfer acceleration state of a bucket can be enabled to be one of the two values mentioned below: 

• Enabled: It enables data transfer with higher speeds to the bucket since transfer acceleration would have been enabled.
• Suspended: It disables the transfer acceleration of data to S3 bucket.  

Conclusion 

In this post, we understood how transfer acceleration service can be used to quickly transfer large data from any part of the world from one client to an S3 bucket and vice-versa.  

Transfer your large data quickly with Transfer Acceleration