S3 Express One Zone
- What it is
- The high-performance Amazon S3 class: single-digit-millisecond first-byte latency, up to 10× faster than S3 Standard, in a single Availability Zone.
- How it differs mechanically
- Uses directory buckets, not general-purpose buckets — you pick the AZ, so storage sits next to the compute using it.
- Priced the other way around from the archival classes: higher storage cost, much lower request cost. It pays off under heavy request volume.
- When to use it
- Request-intensive workloads: ML training loops, interactive analytics, media rendering, financial modelling — hundreds of thousands of requests per second against the same hot dataset.
- The catch
- One AZ. AZ loss means data loss, so keep the source of truth elsewhere and treat this as the hot working copy.
- Exam signal
- “Highest performance”, “single-digit-millisecond”, “request-intensive” → Express One Zone.