AWS S3 object Public URL Dilemma

Question

I am located in Asia-Pacific(Mumbai) region. I have S3 bucket abc.
I have a image A.png with full public read access.

So now URL i can use to access it from internet as suggested by AWS in AWS console is:

• https://s3.ap-south-1.amazonaws.com/abc/A.png

I can also access Image from Following URLs as well:

• https://s3-ap-south-1.amazonaws.com/abc/A.png
• https://abc.s3-ap-south-1.amazonaws.com/A.png

Now AWS Docs here Provides following info:

If my bucket is in US-East(N.Virginia), the URL format provided is

• http://s3.amazonaws.com/abc/A.png - This URL doesn't work for my bucket abc . It gives me following Error.

So my question here is, Do i need to keep in mind about the URL patterns while using public URLs in my applications?
Why AWS is giving different URL patterns instead of standardising one format for virtual-hosted-style and one format for path-style?

Please let me know if i misunderstood any technical details here.

Answer 1

The URL structure you're referring to is called the REST endpoint, as opposed to the Web Site Endpoint.

If your bucket is really in the us-east-1 region of AWS -- which the S3 documentation formerly referred to as the "US Standard" region, but was subsequently officially renamed to the "U.S. East (N. Virginia) Region" -- then http://s3-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/bucket/ is not the correct form for that endpoint, even though it looks like it should be. The correct format for that region is either http://s3.amazonaws.com/bucket/ or http://s3-external-1.amazonaws.com/bucket/.¹

The format you're using is applicable to all the other S3 regions, but not US Standard US East (N. Virginia) [us-east-1].

You can get the list of endpoints from here:

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/rande.html#s3_region

You should use website endpoint & rest endpoint as per actual requirement and use cases.

Please find the details here:

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/WebsiteEndpoints.html#WebsiteRestEndpointDiff

s3-external-1.amazonaws.com has been referred to as the "Northern Virginia endpoint.