AWS S3 Bucket Best Practices for Production
Ten field-tested rules for locking down, versioning and scaling S3 buckets in production workloads.
Series
AWS Foundations
AWS S3 Bucket Best Practices
S3 is deceptively simple. Get these ten rules right and you avoid 90% of production incidents.
1. Block Public Access by default
Always enable Block all public access at the account level. Grant read via CloudFront + OAC, not bucket policies.
2. Enable Versioning
aws s3api put-bucket-versioning --bucket my-bucket --versioning-configuration Status=Enabled
3. Turn on Default Encryption
Use SSE-KMS with a customer-managed CMK. Rotate annually.
4. Lifecycle Rules
Move objects to INTELLIGENT_TIERING after 30 days, GLACIER_IR after 90.
5. Access Logs to a separate bucket
Store logs in a bucket in a different account for tamper-resistance.
6. Object Lock for compliance
Use Governance or Compliance mode for immutable backups.
7. Replicate Critical Data
Cross-region replication (CRR) for DR. Same-region (SRR) for compliance boundaries.
8. Presigned URLs, not public reads
Generate short-lived URLs for downloads.
9. Monitor with CloudTrail data events
Enable S3 data events selectively — they can be noisy but invaluable during incidents.
10. Cost guardrails
Set a CloudWatch alarm on BucketSizeBytes and NumberOfObjects.
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