Amazon Web Services (AWS) is introducing two significant changes to its S3 storage service. A new bucket type, S3 Table, is aimed at data analytics and stores data in Apache Iceberg format. This format provides richer features than Parquet alone and is widely used on S3. S3 Tables offer better performance and support hierarchical storage.
The new S3 Table bucket type creates a REST endpoint on a per-table basis, providing a first-class resource for each table. This allows for access control policy and security policy to be set on the table itself. S3 Tables also offer a 10 times performance boost for access and automatically run maintenance and optimization tasks. Additionally, AWS is introducing Amazon S3 Metadata, a feature that enables fast query of S3 data.
