Amazon S3 vs DigitalOcean Spaces

Overview

Amazon S3

Stacks55.1K

Followers40.2K

Votes2.0K

DigitalOcean Spaces

Stacks87

Followers99

Votes5

Amazon S3 vs DigitalOcean Spaces: What are the differences?

Introduction:

In this article, we will discuss the key differences between Amazon S3 and DigitalOcean Spaces, two popular cloud storage services. Both services offer reliable and scalable object storage solutions, but they have some distinct features that set them apart.

Pricing Model: Amazon S3 offers a usage-based pricing model, charging customers for the number of requests made, the amount of data stored, and the data transfer out of the storage. On the other hand, DigitalOcean Spaces adopts a simplified and predictable pricing structure, which includes a fixed monthly cost based on the storage capacity and the data transfer.
Storage Durability and Availability: Amazon S3 guarantees 99.999999999% durability for objects stored in their infrastructure and provides 99.99% availability. It achieves this level of durability by automatically replicating data across multiple geographically diverse locations. DigitalOcean Spaces offers a 99.99% uptime SLA, ensuring reliable access to stored data.
Data Transfer and Content Delivery Network (CDN): Amazon S3 provides a global network of edge locations powered by Amazon CloudFront, their content delivery network. This allows for fast and efficient content delivery to end-users across the globe. DigitalOcean Spaces, on the other hand, does not have its own CDN. However, it integrates seamlessly with third-party CDNs like Cloudflare and Fastly.
Scalability and Performance: Amazon S3 can handle virtually unlimited storage capacity and concurrent requests, making it suitable for large-scale applications. It also offers faster transfer speeds with features like AWS Transfer Acceleration. DigitalOcean Spaces, while highly scalable, has some limitations in terms of maximum object size and concurrent requests. However, it still provides high-performance storage for most applications.
Integration with Other Services: Amazon S3 has an extensive ecosystem of services and integrations within the AWS platform, making it easy to build complex architectures and workflows. It integrates seamlessly with other AWS services like Lambda, Glacier, and Redshift. DigitalOcean Spaces, although it has fewer integrations, provides straightforward integration with other DigitalOcean services like Droplets and Kubernetes.
Management and Access Control: Amazon S3 offers fine-grained access control and permissions management through AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), allowing users to set up complex access policies. DigitalOcean Spaces provides simple access control mechanisms but lacks the advanced features and flexibility offered by AWS IAM.

In summary, while both Amazon S3 and DigitalOcean Spaces offer reliable and scalable object storage solutions, they differ in terms of pricing model, storage durability and availability, data transfer and CDN integration, scalability and performance, integration with other services, and management and access control capabilities.

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Advice on Amazon S3, DigitalOcean Spaces

Mohammad

Aug 30, 2020

Needs adviceon

Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage

PHP

Laravel

Hello! I have a mobile app with nearly 100k MAU, and I want to add a cloud file storage service to my app.

My app will allow users to store their image, video, and audio files and retrieve them to their device when necessary.

I have already decided to use PHP & Laravel as my backend, and I use Contabo VPS. Now, I need an object storage service for my app, and my options are:

Amazon S3 : It sounds to me like the best option but the most expensive. Closest to my users (MENA Region) for other services, I will have to go to Europe. Not sure how important this is?
DigitalOcean Spaces : Seems like my best option for price/service, but I am still not sure
Wasabi: the best price (6 USD/MONTH/TB) and free bandwidth, but I am not sure if it fits my needs as I want to allow my users to preview audio and video files. They don't recommend their service for streaming videos.
Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage: Good price but not sure about them.
There is also the self-hosted s3 compatible option, but I am not sure about that.

Any thoughts will be helpful. Also, if you think I should post in a different sub, please tell me.

180k views180k

Comments

Dalton

Oct 23, 2020

Decided

Minio is a free and open source object storage system. It can be self-hosted and is S3 compatible. During the early stage it would save cost and allow us to move to a different object storage when we scale up. It is also fast and easy to set up. This is very useful during development since it can be run on localhost.

143k views143k

Comments

Gabriel

CEO at NaoLogic Inc

Dec 24, 2019

Decided

We offer our customer HIPAA compliant storage. After analyzing the market, we decided to go with Google Storage. The Nodejs API is ok, still not ES6 and can be very confusing to use. For each new customer, we created a different bucket so they can have individual data and not have to worry about data loss. After 1000+ customers we started seeing many problems with the creation of new buckets, with saving or retrieving a new file. Many false positive: the Promise returned ok, but in reality, it failed.

That's why we switched to S3 that just works.

330k views330k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Amazon S3	DigitalOcean Spaces
Amazon Simple Storage Service provides a fully redundant data storage infrastructure for storing and retrieving any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web	DigitalOcean Spaces are designed to make it easy and cost effective to store and serve massive amounts of data. Spaces are ideal for storing static, unstructured data like audio, video, and images as well as large amounts of text.
Write, read, and delete objects containing from 1 byte to 5 terabytes of data each. The number of objects you can store is unlimited.;Each object is stored in a bucket and retrieved via a unique, developer-assigned key.;A bucket can be stored in one of several Regions. You can choose a Region to optimize for latency, minimize costs, or address regulatory requirements. Amazon S3 is currently available in the US Standard, US West (Oregon), US West (Northern California), EU (Ireland), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Sydney), South America (Sao Paulo), and GovCloud (US) Regions. The US Standard Region automatically routes requests to facilities in Northern Virginia or the Pacific Northwest using network maps.;Objects stored in a Region never leave the Region unless you transfer them out. For example, objects stored in the EU (Ireland) Region never leave the EU.;Authentication mechanisms are provided to ensure that data is kept secure from unauthorized access. Objects can be made private or public, and rights can be granted to specific users.;Options for secure data upload/download and encryption of data at rest are provided for additional data protection.;Uses standards-based REST and SOAP interfaces designed to work with any Internet-development toolkit.;Built to be flexible so that protocol or functional layers can easily be added. The default download protocol is HTTP. A BitTorrent protocol interface is provided to lower costs for high-scale distribution.;Provides functionality to simplify manageability of data through its lifetime. Includes options for segregating data by buckets, monitoring and controlling spend, and automatically archiving data to even lower cost storage options. These options can be easily administered from the Amazon S3 Management Console.;Reliability backed with the Amazon S3 Service Level Agreement.	Create Spaces in an instant;Scalable storage;Available as a standalone service; Simple drag-and-drop UI;Programmatically control and migrate your data;Backups;Logs;Archives
Statistics
Stacks 55.1K	Stacks 87
Followers 40.2K	Followers 99
Votes 2.0K	Votes 5
Pros & Cons
Pros 590 Reliable 492 Scalable 456 Cheap 329 Simple & easy 83 Many sdks Cons 7 Permissions take some time to get right 6 Takes time/work to organize buckets & folders properly 6 Requires a credit card 3 Complex to set up	Pros 3 Easy setup 2 Cheap
Integrations
No integrations available	DigitalOcean

What are some alternatives to Amazon S3, DigitalOcean Spaces?

Amazon EBS

Amazon EBS volumes are network-attached, and persist independently from the life of an instance. Amazon EBS provides highly available, highly reliable, predictable storage volumes that can be attached to a running Amazon EC2 instance and exposed as a device within the instance. Amazon EBS is particularly suited for applications that require a database, file system, or access to raw block level storage.

Google Cloud Storage

Google Cloud Storage allows world-wide storing and retrieval of any amount of data and at any time. It provides a simple programming interface which enables developers to take advantage of Google's own reliable and fast networking infrastructure to perform data operations in a secure and cost effective manner. If expansion needs arise, developers can benefit from the scalability provided by Google's infrastructure.

Azure Storage

Azure Storage provides the flexibility to store and retrieve large amounts of unstructured data, such as documents and media files with Azure Blobs; structured nosql based data with Azure Tables; reliable messages with Azure Queues, and use SMB based Azure Files for migrating on-premises applications to the cloud.

Minio

Minio is an object storage server compatible with Amazon S3 and licensed under Apache 2.0 License

OpenEBS

OpenEBS allows you to treat your persistent workload containers, such as DBs on containers, just like other containers. OpenEBS itself is deployed as just another container on your host.

Rackspace Cloud Files

Cloud Files, powered by OpenStack®, provides an easy to use online storage for files and media which can be delivered globally at blazing speeds over Akamai's content delivery network (CDN).

Storj

It is an open source, decentralized file storage solution. It uses encryption, file sharing, and a blockchain-based hash table to store files on a peer-to-peer network. The goal is to make cloud file storage faster, cheaper, and private.

RunAbove

We give you full access to the OpenStack API, which our compute (Nova) and storage (Swift) solutions are based on. This means no provider lock-in and easy automation of all your deployments. You can also manage your account and billing details via our RESTful API. You can choose between Horizon or OVH's easy-to-use web panel.

Rook

It is an open source cloud-native storage orchestrator for Kubernetes, providing the platform, framework, and support for a diverse set of storage solutions to natively integrate with cloud-native environments.

DigitalOcean Block Storage

Add more storage space, mix and match compute and storage to suit your database, file storage, application, service, mobile, and backup needs.

Related Comparisons

Amazon S3 vs DigitalOcean Spaces: What are the differences?

Introduction:

Pricing Model: Amazon S3 offers a usage-based pricing model, charging customers for the number of requests made, the amount of data stored, and the data transfer out of the storage. On the other hand, DigitalOcean Spaces adopts a simplified and predictable pricing structure, which includes a fixed monthly cost based on the storage capacity and the data transfer.
Storage Durability and Availability: Amazon S3 guarantees 99.999999999% durability for objects stored in their infrastructure and provides 99.99% availability. It achieves this level of durability by automatically replicating data across multiple geographically diverse locations. DigitalOcean Spaces offers a 99.99% uptime SLA, ensuring reliable access to stored data.
Data Transfer and Content Delivery Network (CDN): Amazon S3 provides a global network of edge locations powered by Amazon CloudFront, their content delivery network. This allows for fast and efficient content delivery to end-users across the globe. DigitalOcean Spaces, on the other hand, does not have its own CDN. However, it integrates seamlessly with third-party CDNs like Cloudflare and Fastly.
Scalability and Performance: Amazon S3 can handle virtually unlimited storage capacity and concurrent requests, making it suitable for large-scale applications. It also offers faster transfer speeds with features like AWS Transfer Acceleration. DigitalOcean Spaces, while highly scalable, has some limitations in terms of maximum object size and concurrent requests. However, it still provides high-performance storage for most applications.
Integration with Other Services: Amazon S3 has an extensive ecosystem of services and integrations within the AWS platform, making it easy to build complex architectures and workflows. It integrates seamlessly with other AWS services like Lambda, Glacier, and Redshift. DigitalOcean Spaces, although it has fewer integrations, provides straightforward integration with other DigitalOcean services like Droplets and Kubernetes.
Management and Access Control: Amazon S3 offers fine-grained access control and permissions management through AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), allowing users to set up complex access policies. DigitalOcean Spaces provides simple access control mechanisms but lacks the advanced features and flexibility offered by AWS IAM.

Amazon S3 vs DigitalOcean Spaces

Overview