Amazon S3 or Amazon Simple Storage Service is a service offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that provides object storage through a web service interface.
Amazon Simple Storage Service, widely known as Amazon S3, is a highly scalable, fast, and durable solution for object-level storage of any data type. Unlike the operating systems we are all used to, Amazon S3 does not store files in a file system, instead it stores files as objects. Object Storage allows users to upload files, videos, and documents like you were to upload files, videos, and documents to popular cloud storage products like Dropbox and Google Drive. This makes Amazon S3 very flexible and platform agnostic.
Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3 are different enough that the average person should be able to draw the distinction without much difficulty.
Amazon EC2s provide a way to access cloud-based servers, also known as virtual machines. You can do pretty much anything on these virtual machines. Consider them the same as your own home computer, but running Linux (or Windows in some cases), and you need a terminal or shell to connect to them virtually.
S3 buckets are used as a storage location for backing up data in conjunction with EC2s. You can store photos, text logs, videos, songs, books, and other files in an S3 bucket.
In short, think of Amazon EC2 as your personal computer but it lives in the cloud, and Amazon S3 would be an external hard drive or cloud storage service similar to Dropbox.
How S3 works
Amazon S3 works as an object storage service. This is different from your typical file storage or even block storage. When a user uploads data to S3, that file is stored as an object with metadata intact and the object as a whole is given an ID.
There are two different kinds of metadata. System-Defined and User-Defined Metadata. System metadata is used for S3 to maintain important things such as creation date, size, and last-modified.
Objects also take in user-defined metadata. User-defined metadata allows users to assign key-value pairs to the data they upload. These key-value pairs help users identify, organize, and assign objects to specific resources, or allow for easy retrieval.
For more information on s3 refer here https://docs.aws.amazon.com/s3/
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