Creating Your S3 Bucket

NoteSaxaNet vs. GuestNet

If you are on Georgetown’s campus, make sure that you are connected to the SaxaNet wifi network, and not the GuestNet wifi network. SSHing into a remote instance is blocked on GuestNet, which means if you are on GuestNet you wil not be able to connect to your EC2 instances.

Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is AWS’s object storage service that allows you to store and retrieve data from anywhere on the web. In this task, you’ll create an S3 bucket to store datasets, code outputs, and other files for your projects.

Navigate to S3 Service

1. From the AWS Console home page, search for S3 in the search bar at the top or find it under the “Storage” section.

2. Click on S3 to open the S3 dashboard.

View S3 Buckets Dashboard

Once in the S3 service, you’ll see the main S3 buckets dashboard. This shows all your existing buckets (if any) and allows you to create new ones.

Create a New S3 Bucket

1. Click on the Create bucket button (orange button on the right side of the page).

2. Configure your bucket:
   • Bucket name: Enter a unique name like {your-net-id}-dsan6k-f2025 (replace {your-net-id} with your actual NET ID)
     • Note: Bucket names must be globally unique across all AWS accounts, lowercase, and can contain only letters, numbers, and hyphens
   • AWS Region: Leave as default (should match your EC2 region, typically us-east-1)
   • Object Ownership: Leave as default (ACLs disabled)
   • Block Public Access settings: Leave all boxes checked (block all public access) for security
   • Bucket Versioning: Leave as “Disable” for now
   • Tags: Optional - you can add tags like course: dsan6000 if desired
   • Default encryption: Leave as default (Server-side encryption with Amazon S3 managed keys)
   • Advanced settings: Leave as default
3. Scroll to the bottom and click Create bucket.

View Your Created Bucket

After creation, you’ll be redirected to the S3 buckets list where you can see your newly created bucket.

Upload a Test File to Your Bucket

1. Click on your bucket name to open it.

2. Click the Upload button.

3. Either drag and drop files or click Add files to browse and select files from your computer.

4. For testing, you can create a simple text file on your computer with some content and upload it.

5. After selecting your file(s), click Upload at the bottom of the page.

6. Once uploaded, you’ll see a success message. Click Close to return to your bucket view.

Tip

Your S3 bucket is now ready to use! You can upload datasets, store output files, and share data between different AWS services. The bucket name you created will be used in subsequent labs and assignments.

Working with S3 from the Command Line

Once you connect to your EC2 instance via VSCode (in the next section), you can interact with your S3 bucket using the AWS CLI, which is pre-installed on EC2 instances with the LabInstanceProfile. Here are some useful commands you’ll use:

# List all your S3 buckets
aws s3 ls

# List contents of a specific bucket
aws s3 ls s3://your-bucket-name/

# Upload a file to S3
aws s3 cp local-file.txt s3://your-bucket-name/

# Download a file from S3
aws s3 cp s3://your-bucket-name/file.txt ./

# Upload an entire directory
aws s3 sync ./local-folder s3://your-bucket-name/folder/

# Download an entire directory
aws s3 sync s3://your-bucket-name/folder/ ./local-folder

NoteNaming Your Bucket

Remember to replace your-bucket-name with the actual name of the bucket you created (e.g., {your-net-id}-dsan6k-f2025).