🧱 1. S3 Object (File) Size Limits
| Type |
Limit |
| Minimum object size |
0 bytes |
| Maximum single PUT upload |
5 GB |
| Maximum object size (using multipart upload) |
5 TB ✅ |
So:
- You can upload files up to 5 GB directly with a single
PUT request.
- For larger files (up to 5 TB), you use multipart upload, which splits the file into parts (each 5 MB–5 GB) and uploads them in parallel.
👉 Engineering drawings, videos, large archives, etc. all work fine with multipart upload.
🪣 2. Bucket and Total Storage Limits
| Category |
Limit |
| Number of buckets per AWS account (by default) |
100 (can request increase) |
| Objects per bucket |
Unlimited ✅ |
| Total storage per account or bucket |
Unlimited ✅ |
There’s no maximum total size for how much data you can store in S3.
You can store petabytes or even exabytes of data — AWS scales automatically behind the scenes.
⚙️ 3. Performance and Request Limits
-
No pre-partitioning required anymore (S3 auto-scales request performance).
- You can achieve tens of thousands of requests per second per prefix.
- You can use multiple key prefixes if you need even higher throughput.
🔐 4. Practical Limits
The only real limits you might hit are:
-
Request rate (can be scaled with prefixes and parallelism)
-
API throttling (handled automatically with retries)
-
Account-level service quotas, which can be raised if needed.
✅ Summary
| Limit Type |
Value |
| Max single upload |
5 GB |
| Max object size |
5 TB |
| Max buckets per account |
100 (default) |
| Max objects per bucket |
Unlimited |
| Total storage |
Unlimited |
🧱 EBS size Limits
| Type |
Limit |
| Maximum size per EBS volume |
128 TiB ✅ |
| Minimum size per EBS volume |
1 GiB |
| Number of volumes per instance |
Varies by instance type (can be dozens) |
| Total storage per account / region |
Soft limit, can be increased (default ~20 TiB–100 TiB quota) |
✅ EBS Performance
| Metric |
gp3 (General Purpose SSD) |
io2 (Provisioned IOPS SSD) |
st1 / sc1 (HDD types) |
| Max IOPS |
16,000 |
256,000 |
N/A (throughput-based) |
| Max Throughput |
1,000 MB/s |
4,000 MB/s |
500 MB/s |
| Latency |
Single-digit milliseconds |
Sub-millisecond |
Higher |
🧱 ** EFS size Limits**
| Resource |
Limit |
| Maximum file system size |
Petabytes+ (no defined limit) |
| Maximum file size |
52 TiB per file |
| Number of files per file system |
Millions+ (based on inode usage) |
| Max throughput |
Depends on storage mode (bursting or provisioned) |
| Performance scaling |
Increases automatically with size (50 MiB/s per TiB stored) |
Summary
| Feature |
EFS |
EBS |
S3 |
| Type |
File system (NFS) |
Block storage |
Object storage |
| Max Size |
Petabytes (auto) |
128 TiB per volume |
Unlimited |
| Access |
Shared (multi-instance) |
Single instance |
Global HTTP access |
| Cost |
💰 High |
💵 Moderate |
💸 Very low |
| Best For |
Shared app data |
Databases |
Backups, media, analytics |
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