Because S3 was designed as a web service, it doesn't come with built-in admin tools, dashboards, GUIs, or other management tools. Instead, developers interact with S3 using only API calls. S3 provides a robust set of APIs that provide for any actions and options you need, not just afterthought levers and knobs that fall short of the mark. Because the APIs are so good, there are many ways to interact with S3's services, some of them very creative.

Many third-party products use S3 to power remote backup and storage solutions. .NET developers can easily use S3's functions with a great set of libraries that's available at www.codeplex.com/ThreeSharp. In this article, however, I'll ignore most of the cooler aspects of interacting with those APIs and will focus on the ins and outs of using S3 as a content delivery solution that you can integrate with ASP.NET sites.

Getting Started with Amazon S3

Setting up an S3 account is free. The account provides you with an Access Key (or ID) and a Secret Access Key that's used to sign secured requests when interacting with the API. Once you have an account, you can start issuing API calls to create buckets and upload files. For simple content-management purposes, however, it's easier to grab a third-party application that lets you interact with your S3 account similarly to how to use an FTP site. Personally, I love Cloudberry Explorer for Amazon S3, shown in Figure 2. It's full-featured and updated regularly, and the free version is amazingly capable out of the box.

Figure 2

Accessing uploaded content from your buckets with a browser is simple. Just concatenate your unique bucket name, the host name for Amazon's S3 servers, and the key for the file you want to pull down:

http://<your-bucket>.s3.amazonaws.com/<unique-resource-key >

You can also CNAME part of your site over to Amazon to make buckets part of your domain. Create a bucket name that matches the full name of your host then CNAME the target host to Amazon by prepending the bucket name to Amazon's host name, as outlined in Figure 3.

Figure 3