Amazon S3 Metadata

Cambridge Mobile Telematics (CMT) is the world’s largest telematics service provider. Its mission is to make the world’s roads and drivers safer. The company’s AI-driven platform, DriveWell Fusion®, gathers sensor data from millions of IoT devices — including smartphones, proprietary Tags, connected vehicles, dashcams, and third-party devices — and fuses them with contextual data to create a unified view of vehicle and driver behavior.

"At CMT, we store and analyze multiple petabytes of data from mobile IoT devices worldwide to enhance driver and road safety. As we scale, locating specific data for developing new insights and models becomes increasingly challenging. S3 Metadata, particularly its custom metadata capability, allows us to annotate all our data and maintain the metadata in a managed, queryable table. Now, finding relevant data requires just one efficient and cost-effective SQL query. This makes S3 Metadata a game-changer, enabling us to bring new capabilities to our customers."

Tim Vogel, Chief Information Officer – Cambridge Mobile Telematics

PayPal has been revolutionizing commerce globally for more than 25 years. Creating innovative experiences that make moving money, selling, and shopping simple, personalized, and secure, PayPal empowers consumers and businesses in approximately 200 markets to join and thrive in the global economy.

"S3 Metadata provides us with a simple, straightforward mechanism to analyze trillions of S3 objects using standard tools like Amazon Athena and Amazon QuickSight. With this functionality, we can spend our time making decisions rather than building our complex data pipelines to access and query S3 object metadata."

Jon Southall, VP Engineering, Large Enterprise Platforms – PayPal

Roche is a biotech company that combines pharmaceuticals and diagnostics to achieve advances in personalized healthcare and improve people’s lives.

"S3 Metadata accelerates our generative AI initiatives. As we build LLM applications such as internal chatbots for our teams, unstructured data like PDFs are becoming increasingly valuable. We need to ingest lots of domain-specific documents to a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) application so that the chatbot can tailor to Roche’s specific business contexts. However, this also means that we have more and more unstructured data that we need to manage. We need a metadata system to efficiently describe our unstructured data so that our users can quickly sift through our large data lake to identify the relevant datasets for the particular generative AI application that they are building. With S3 Metadata, building a robust metadata system has been simplified to a few clicks in the AWS Management Console. As we continuously ingest more unstructured data, S3 Metadata automatically surfaces the metadata and keeps the metadata up-to-date. We also employ our own Lambda to extract business-specific metadata, such as classifying documents based on a taxonomy relevant to Roche, and store this metadata in the same glue catalog alongside the S3 Metadata table so that with a simple SQL join we can have all the metadata we need. S3 Metadata helps us build generative AI applications faster, which allows us to focus on building rather than organizing our data."

Yannick Misteli, Head of Pharma Commercial Engineering – Roche

SmugMug and Flickr provide online platforms where photographers can upload and share photos and videos. The company stores billions of photos and videos on its application.

"Photos uploaded to SmugMug and Flickr pass through a series of pipelines, where we run feature detection, metadata extraction, point of interest calculations, and in some instances face detection. Until now, all of that context lived in separate databases that we had to keep synchronized with hundreds of billions of objects in S3. With S3 annotations, we can attach all of the relevant data directly to the photo object at ingest time, in structured JSON, up to 1 MB per annotation. Our enrichment results now travel with the object through replication and cross-region transfers, and we can query across all of them at scale through annotation tables without building our own indexing layer. This is a fundamental simplification of how we connect intelligence to storage."

Erik Giberti, Sr. Director of Product & Engineering – SmugMug

"Imagine flying a time machine through your Amazon S3 data. At SmugMug and Flickr, we’ve stored over 22 years of our customers’ photos, hundreds of billions of objects, in S3. The new S3 Metadata feature helps us to easily explore our S3 object metadata easily and affordably, querying across metadata such as object size over time to understand how our data has evolved, which previously involved joining expensive database queries with object inventories. Understanding how our photographers use our storage helps further our commitment to build a better world through the power of photography."

Andrew Shieh, Principal Engineer – SmugMug

Atlan is an active metadata platform and data management company that serves as the context layer for enterprise AI. It connects metadata, data lineage, and business logic into a unified graph, enabling AI agents and human teams to discover, understand, and trust enterprise data.

"Enterprises run AI agents everywhere, and those agents only succeed when they have trusted context to act on data correctly. Atlan automatically collects and enriches enterprise context across a customer's systems of record and data, including the objects in their S3 buckets, and we keep that context open to any agent through formats like Apache Iceberg and protocols like MCP. With Amazon S3 Metadata annotation tables, Atlan's context for S3 can be made available directly on the objects as an Iceberg-native annotation table, queryable through Amazon Athena and other Iceberg compatible tools— so an agent can read the data in S3 and its Atlan context together, wherever it runs."

Chandru Sugunan, Director of Product – Atlan

Nomad Media is an AI-powered media asset management platform that helps organizations turn overlooked content libraries into strategic assets. Built on AWS’s enterprise-grade infrastructure, the platform combines intelligent content discovery, automated enrichment, and seamless integrations to give teams a smarter, simpler way to organize, find, and activate their media at any scale.

"Nomad Media automatically enriches every asset that enters our platform with AI-generated metadata including transcriptions, scene descriptors, object tags, and rights availability windows, and that intelligence is only valuable if it stays with the content it describes. As our customers' assets move across storage tiers, replicate across regions, and transition into deep archive, S3 annotations give us a native mechanism to keep that metadata bound directly to each object without building or maintaining synchronization logic on our side. The result is that the AI enrichment generated on day one travels with the asset for its entire lifecycle, exactly where intelligent media management requires it to be."

Adam Miller, CEO and Co-Founder – Nomad Media

RAZR is a technology company that delivers intelligent, scalable rewards and loyalty solutions. We help businesses acquire, retain, and grow customers through our configurable technology that drives engagement and long-term value across industries.

"We're building a new file ingestion platform on Amazon S3, and tracking processing status across objects at scale was a core requirement from day one. With S3 annotations, we attach structured processing context directly to each object as it moves through our pipeline stage - no separate metadata system to build or keep in sync. We can then query that state at scale through Athena without schema migrations. Annotations persist through the object lifecycle and replicate automatically, so our team always knows exactly where any object stands. This is exactly the capability we needed to build this right from the start."

Liam Whelan, Director of Software Engineering – RAZR

Solink offers trusted cloud video security systems for businesses of all sizes. Its hardware and software help give visibility to IT, loss prevention, operations, and security teams at tens of thousands of locations in more than 40 countries.

"Solink processes over 500 million hours of video monthly, integrating security footage with critical business data from over 350 sources. AWS supports the infrastructure we rely on and Amazon S3 Metadata will take that further—delivering real-time insights that enhance our content management, from monitoring storage and usage to tracking real-time effects of customer configuration changes."

Martin Soukup, Chief Technical Officer – Solink

Commvault is the gold standard in cyber resilience, helping more than 100,000 organizations keep data safe and businesses resilient and moving forward. Today, Commvault offers the only cyber resilience platform that combines the best data security and rapid recovery at enterprise scale across any workload, anywhere—at the lowest TCO.

"Amazon S3 has emerged as a leading cloud storage provider for various data types. Amazon S3 Metadata will enable vendors like Commvault to proactively help identify and safeguard sensitive information, while also helping to automate elements like data tiering, and enhance outcomes for our shared customers. S3 Metadata facilitates efficient data organization and helps streamline data discovery, allowing for detailed annotation of objects, which is crucial for cloud-first cyber resilience."

Pranay Ahlawat, Chief Technology and AI Officer – Commvault

The New Relic Intelligent Observability Platform gives customers deep performance analytics for every part of your software environment. Customers can easily view and analyze massive amounts of data, and gain actionable insights in real-time.

"As a leader in observability, New Relic’s data engine processes approximately 1.3 exabytes of Amazon S3 data daily. S3 Metadata will accelerate our innovation by automatically generating rich object metadata, thereby simplifying data exploration needed by our teams to run product experiments and build proofs of concept, such as developing new metrics beneficial for our customers. S3 Metadata will reduce our effort to build and maintain a robust metadata system from hundreds of hours to just a few clicks in the S3 Management Console, enabling our engineers to focus on data analysis rather than data organization."

Siva Padisetty, Chief Technology Officer – New Relic