A cloud infrastructure should be fault tolerant i.e. it should continue to function and provide services even if a fault or failure has occurred anywhere due to any reason. This property gives a major boost to the reliability and availability of your cloud environment. AWS S3 is one of the most commonly used services. It is recommended to follow certain practices related to versioning of your S3 buckets which will help your cloud infrastructure to achieve higher levels of fault tolerance.
What is Amazon S3?
S3 stands for Simple Storage Service. S3 is a web service interface provided by AWS which can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data at any time and anywhere from the internet. S3 provisions large organizations to simply and securely collect, store, and analyze their data at a massive scale.
Why is AWS S3 bucket versioning essential for fault tolerance?
S3 provides various useful features to their users. One such useful feature is bucket versioning. Users can enable versioning for S3 buckets to preserve every version of an object (user data) when an operation such as copy or delete is performed on it. This feature comes in very handy when there is an accidental deletion of any object which can be retrieved back using the version of that object stored in the same S3 bucket. Once versioning is enabled on a bucket, it will never return to an unversioned state. However, versioning can be suspended on that bucket.
In order to achieve fault tolerance, versioning plays an important role. There can be a situation where there are certain important files stores in S3 bucket in the form of objects. If those files get accidentally deleted, then it would create stagnation in the workflow and the organization will come to a standstill. Your cloud environment can be fault tolerant only when there are provisions to handle such situations so that it has no adverse impact on your overall infrastructure.
How does Centilytics improve your situation?
Centilytics provides versioning status of all S3 buckets existing in your AWS account and helps you figure out which bucket is fault tolerant and which is not, thus helping you to figure out the security of your S3 buckets in your cloud environment.
Insight Description:
There can be 2 possible scenarios:
| Severity | Description |
 OK |
If versioning is enabled for a bucket, then green indication will be displayed corresponding to that bucket |
 WARNING |
If versioning is disabled or suspended for a bucket, then yellow indication will be displayed corresponding to that bucket. |
Description of further columns are as follows:
- Account Id: Shows the respective account ID of user’s account.
- Account Name: Shows corresponding account name to the user’s account.
- Identifier: Shows the corresponding bucket name.
Filters applicable:
| Filter Name | Description |
| Account Id | Applying the account Id filter will display data for the selected account Id. |
| Region | Applying region filter will display data corresponding to the selected region |
| Severity | Applying severity filter will display public snapshots according to the selected severity type i.e. selecting critical will display all resources with critical severity. Same will be the case for Warning and Ok severity types. |
| Resource Tags | Applying resource tags filter will display data which will have the selected resource tag. For eg- If the user has tagged any resource using a tag named environment, then selecting environment from the resource tags filter will display all the data accordingly |
| Resource Tags Value | Applying resource tags value filter will display data which will have the selected resource tag value. For e.g. If the user has tagged some resource by a tag named environment and has given it a value say production (environment:production), the user will be able to view data of all the resources which are tagged as “environment:production”. The user can use the tag value filter only when a tag name has been provided. |
Compliances covered
| Compliance Name | Reference No. | Link |
| Trusted Advisor | – | https://console.aws.amazon.com/trustedadvisor/home?#/category/fault-tolerance |
Read More:
[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/Welcome.html
[2] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/Versioning.html
[3] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/user-guide/enable-versioning.html