Amazon S3

Last modified: November 19, 2024

Introduction

The Amazon S3 connector enables you to connect your app to Amazon S3 and easily store objects.

Typical Use Cases

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service offering industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance. Customers of all sizes and industries can store and protect any amount of data for virtually any use case, such as data lakes, cloud-native applications, and mobile apps. With cost-effective storage classes and easy-to-use management features, you can optimize costs, organize data, and configure fine-tuned access controls to meet specific business, organizational, and compliance requirements. Some typical use cases of Amazon S3 are:

Build a data lake - Run big data analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and high performance computing (HPC) applications to unlock data insights.
Back up and restore critical data - Meet Recovery Time Objectives (RTO), Recovery Point Objectives (RPO), and compliance requirements with S3’s robust replication features.
Archive data at the lowest cost - Move data archives to the Amazon S3 Glacier storage classes to lower costs, eliminate operational complexities, and gain new insights.
Run cloud-native applications - Build fast, powerful mobile and web-based cloud-native apps that scale automatically in a highly available configuration.

Prerequisites

The Amazon S3 connector requires the AWS Authentication connector version 2.1 or higher to authenticate with Amazon Web Services (AWS). If you are using the Amazon S3 connector version 3.0 or higher, it requires the AWS Authentication connector version 3.0 or higher. It is crucial for the Amazon S3 connector to function correctly. For more information about installing and configuring the AWS Authentication connector, see AWS Authentication.

Licensing and Cost

This connector is available as a free download from the Mendix Marketplace, but the AWS service to which is connects may incur a usage cost. For more information, refer to AWS documentation.

Most AWS services provide a free tier that allows easy access to most services. To find out if this service is included in the free tier, see AWS Free Tier. To calculate the potential cost of using an AWS service outside of the free tier, use the AWS Cost calculator.

Depending on your use case, your deployment environment, and the type of app that you want to build, you may also need a license for your Mendix app. For more information, refer to Licensing Apps.

Installation

Follow the instructions in How to Use Marketplace Content to import the Amazon S3 connector into your app.

Configuration

After you install the connector, you can find it in the App Explorer, in the AmazonS3Connector section. The connector provides a domain model and several activities that you can use to connect your app to Amazon S3. Each activity can be implemented by using it in a microflow. To ensure that your app can connect to the AWS service, you must also configure AWS authentication for the connector.

Configuring AWS Authentication

In order to use the Amazon S3 service, you must authenticate with AWS. To do so, you must set up a configuration profile in your Mendix app. After you set up the configuration profile, the connector module handles the authentication internally.

As of version 3.0.0 of the AWS Authentication Connector, all the resources and logic required to set up authentication are centralized inside the AWS Authentication Connector module.

The AWS Authentication Connector supports both static credentials and temporary credentials. For more information and detailed instructions please refer to the AWS Authentication Connector documentation page.

Configuring a Microflow for an AWS Service

After you configure the authentication profile for Amazon S3, you can implement the functions of the connector by using the provided activities in microflows. For example, to create a bucket in S3, perform the following steps:

In the App Explorer, right-click on the name of your module, and then click Add microflow.
Enter a name for your microflow, for example, DS_CreateBucket, and then click OK.
In the App Explorer, in the AmazonS3Connector > Operations section, find the CreateBucket activity.
Drag the CreateBucket activity onto the microflow you are working on.
Double-click the CreateBucket activity and configure the AWS_Region parameter by doing the following steps:
1. Click Edit parameter value, edit the ENUM_Region parameter, and change Type to Expression.
2. In the expression builder, type ENUM_Region, and then press Ctrl + Space.
3. In the autocomplete dialog, select AWSAuthentication.ENUM_Region, then type . and select your AWS region from the list.
In the App Explorer, in the AWSAuthentication > Operations section, find the GetStaticCredentials and GetTemporaryCredentials actions.
Drag the one you would like to use onto the microflow you are working on, and position it between the microflow start event and the CreateBucket activity.
Double-click the microflow action and then configure the required Region parameter in the same way as described in step 5.
Double-click the CreateBucket activity and configure the Credentials parameter by doing the following steps:
1. Click Edit parameter value.
2. Edit the Credentials parameter and let it auto-fill.
In the Toolbox pane, search for the Create Object activity, drag it onto the microflow area, and position it between the GetStaticCredentials or GetTemporaryCredentials and the CreateBucket activity.
Double-click the Create Object activity, and then select AmazonS3Connector.CreateBucketRequest as the entity.
In the Member section, click New, and then select BucketName as the member.
Configure an expression to generate the names of the buckets created in Amazon S3 by the microflow.

The name generated by the expression must be all lower-case. If the bucket name is not lower-case, the Amazon S3 service will return an error.
Click OK, and then click OK again.
Double-click the CreateBucket activity and configure the CreateBucketRequest parameter by doing the following steps:
1. Click Edit parameter value.
2. Edit the CreateBucketRequest parameter and let it auto-fill.

Technical Reference

The module includes technical reference documentation for the available entities, enumerations, activities, and other items that you can use in your application. You can view the information about each object in context by using the Documentation pane in Studio Pro.

The Documentation pane displays the documentation for the currently selected element. To view it, perform the following steps:

In the View menu of Studio Pro, select Documentation.
Click on the element for which you want to view the documentation.