How to enable versioning Amazon S3

Lab Details

This lab will show you how to enable versioning on an AWS S3 bucket. Versioning allows you keep multiple versions of an object within one bucket.

Duration: 30 minutes

AWS Region: US East, N. Virginia us-east-1

Introduction

What is versioning?

Versioning allows you to keep multiple versions of the same object in a bucket.

Versioning is used for storing, retrieving, and restoring every version of any object in an S3 bucket.

Versioning takes place at the S3 Bucket Level.

Versioning can be enabled via the AWS Console/ SDKs/ API.

Versioning can't be disabled completely once it is enabled.

The alternative to disabling versioning is placing the bucket in a "versioning-suspended" state.

The downside to having multiple versions is that you will be billed multiple times because the objects are being stored in S3 each and every time.

S3 offers a Lifecycle Management feature to prevent multiple versions of the exact same object. This allows us to decide what to do if multiple versions of an object start piling up.

Versioning has the advantage that we can grant permissions to versioned objects, i.e. we can determine which version is public and which is private.