Amazon S3 now lets you attach multiple named annotations—structured JSON or plain text—directly to objects and manage them independently via the GetObjectAnnotation and ListObjectAnnotations APIs. This feature scales to petabytes, works across storage classes, and avoids separate metadata systems.

Andy Warfield recounts how genomic researchers struggled with moving large datasets between local filesystems and S3, spurring the creation of S3 Files to present S3 buckets as POSIX-compatible file stores. The post then covers how Amazon added S3 Tables for managed Iceberg tables and built-in vector indexing to cut storage friction and speed up analytics and search.