Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced the general availability of Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) Express One Zone.

This new, high-performance storage class is designed to deliver the highest performance and lowest latency object storage for frequently accessed data. The announcement came directly from AWS re:Invent, introducing what is currently the lowest latency cloud object storage, with data access speeds up to ten times faster and request costs up to 50% lower than Amazon S3 Standard.

Concerning this, James Kirschner, general manager of Amazon S3 at AWS, said, "Millions of customers rely on Amazon S3 for everything from low-cost archival storage to petabyte-scale data lakes, and they want to expand their use to support their most performance-intensive applications where every millisecond counts."

"Amazon S3 Express One Zone delivers the fastest data access speed for the most latency-sensitive applications and enables customers to make millions of requests per minute for their highly accessed datasets, while also reducing request and compute costs."

Express One Zone's revolutionary data access speed and performance cater to a broad range of usage scenarios, from artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning training to real-time advertising and content creation.

Customers can scale their storage up or down according to their needs and utilise familiar Amazon S3 APIs. Amazon S3 Express One Zone already boasts users like ChaosSearch, Cloudera, Colorfront, and Pinterest.

Thomas Hazel, the founder and chief technology officer at ChaosSearch, applauded AWS's newest offering, expressing, "We already benefit from Amazon S3's unmatched scalability, durability, availability, and security, and now it is supercharged for high-performance analytics at scale."

"With Amazon S3 Express One Zone, we get rapid time to insight with 60% faster queries and substantial cost savings through lower query costs - without any code modifications."

Jim Clark, vice president of Product Management at Cloudera, echoed Hazel’s enthusiasm and said, “With Amazon S3 Express One Zone’s data access speed alone, Cloudera customers can achieve up to 40% faster read and write performance, driving faster insights and value from their data."

"We are actively working to support Amazon S3 Express One Zone across Cloudera to improve performance and lower our customers' cloud infrastructure costs."

Brandon Heaslip, director of Solutions Engineering at Colorfront, also provided praise for the service, "With Amazon S3 Express One Zone's single-digit millisecond data access speed, Colorfront customers can accelerate their digital video processing by up to 70% to meet diverse media and entertainment demands for streaming delivery while maintaining digital video standards."

Ambud Sharma, technology lead, Data Engineering at Pinterest, provided an example of the benefits provided by Amazon S3 Express One Zone, "During our evaluation of the Amazon S3 Express One Zone storage class, we saw latency improvements of over 10 times while increasing our data processing transactions per second."

"Amazon S3 Express One Zone allows us to enable higher velocity data consumption and more frequent experimentations, while significantly reducing infrastructure costs."