Working with S3 Vectors and vector buckets
Note
Amazon S3 Vectors is in preview release for Amazon Simple Storage Service and is subject to change.
What is Amazon S3 Vectors?
Amazon S3 Vectors delivers purpose-built, cost-optimized vector storage for your semantic search and AI applications. With Amazon S3 level elasticity and durability for storing vector datasets with sub-second query performance, S3 Vectors is ideal for applications that need to build and grow vector indexes. You get a dedicated set of API operations to store, access, and perform similarity queries on vector data without provisioning any infrastructure. S3 Vectors consists of several key components that work together:
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Vector buckets – A new bucket type that's purpose-built to store and query vectors.
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Vector indexes – Within a vector bucket, you can organize your vector data within vector indexes. You perform similarity queries on your vector data within vector indexes.
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Vectors – You store vectors in your vector index. For similarity search and AI applications, vectors are created as vector embeddings which are numerical representations that preserve semantic relationships between content (such as text, images, or audio) so similar items are positioned closer together. S3 Vectors can perform similarity searches based on semantic meaning rather than exact matching through comparing how close vectors are to each other mathematically. When adding vector data to a vector index, you can also attach metadata for future filtering queries based on a set of conditions (for example, timestamps, categories, and user preferences).
Writes to S3 Vectors are strongly consistent, which means that you can immediately access the most recently added data. As you write, update, and delete vectors over time, S3 Vectors automatically optimizes the vector data to achieve the best possible price performance for vector storage, even as the data sets scale and evolve. You can control access to your vector data with the existing access control mechanisms of Amazon S3, including bucket and IAM policies. For more information about vector index limits per bucket and vector limits per index, see Limitations and restrictions.
Use cases: Similarity searches across large datasets
Similarity searches allow you to find items that are conceptually related to each other based on their vector representations, rather than exact keyword matches. These searches identify content with similar meanings or characteristics, even when the exact words or visual elements differ.
Common use cases for similarity search with S3 Vectors include:
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Medical imaging - Find similarities in millions of medical images to assist with diagnosis and treatment planning
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Copyright infringement - Identify potentially derivative content across large media libraries
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Image deduplication - Detect and remove duplicate or near-duplicate images from large image collections
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Video understanding - Search for specific scenes or content within video assets
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Enterprise document search - Enable semantic search across corporate documents to find relevant information based on meaning
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Personalization - Deliver tailored recommendations by finding similar items
You should use S3 Vectors if you want to build cost-effective vector search and
agentic AI applications with sub-second search times. With vector buckets, you only
pay for what you use, and could save costs for uploading, storing,
and querying vector embeddings. For more information about pricing, see Amazon S3 pricing
Features of S3 Vectors
Purpose-built storage for vectors
S3 Vectors is the first purpose-built object storage in the cloud to store and query vectors. Vector buckets are designed to provide cost-effective, elastic, and durable storage for vector data.
Vector embeddings are transforming how customers use and retrieve their unstructured data, from detecting similarities across medical images, finding anomalies in thousands of hours of video footage, navigating through large code bases, and identifying the most relevant case law for a given legal matter. These emerging applications combine with embedding models to encode the semantic meaning of data (for example, text, images, video, code) as numerical vector embeddings.
Within a vector bucket, you organize your vector data within vector indexes, without provisioning infrastructure. As you write, update, and delete vectors over time, S3 Vectors automatically optimize the vector data to achieve the best possible price performance for vector storage, even as the data sets scale and evolve. For more information about vector index limits per bucket and vector limits per index, see Limitations and restrictions.
Perform similarity queries
With S3 Vectors, you can perform efficient similarity queries to find the most similar vectors to a query vector, with sub-second response times. S3 Vectors is ideal for workloads where queries are less frequent.
Metadata filtering
You can attach metadata (for example, year, author, genre, and location) as key-value pairs to your vectors. By default, all metadata is filterable unless you explicitly specify it as non-filterable. You can use filterable metadata to filter your query results based on specific attributes, enhancing the relevance of your queries. Vector indexes support string, number, boolean, and list types of metadata. For more information about metadata size limits per vector and filterable metadata size limits per vector, see Limitations and restrictions.
Access management and security
You can manage access for resources in vector buckets with IAM and Service Control Policies in AWS Organizations. S3 Vectors uses a
different service namespace than Amazon S3: the s3vectors namespace.
Therefore, you can design policies specifically for the S3 Vectors service and its
resources. You can design policies to grant access to individual vector indexes,
all vector indexes within a vector bucket, or all vector buckets in an
account. All Amazon S3 Block Public Access settings are always enabled for
vector buckets and cannot be disabled.
Integration with AWS services
S3 Vectors integrates with other AWS services to enhance your vector processing capabilities:
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Amazon OpenSearch Service
- Optimize vector storage costs while continuing to use OpenSearch API operations. This is ideal for workloads that need advanced search functionality such as hybrid search, aggregations, advanced filtering, and faceted search. You can also export a snapshot of an S3 vector index to Amazon OpenSearch Serverless for high QPS and low latency vector search. -
Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases
- Select a vector index in S3 Vectors as your vector store to save on storage costs for retrieval augmented generation (RAG) applications. -
Amazon Bedrock in SageMaker Unified Studio
- Develop and test knowledge bases using S3 Vectors as your vector store.
