AWS News Blog

Today, I’m excited to announce that Amazon S3 Vectors is now generally available with significantly increased scale and production-grade performance capabilities. S3 Vectors is the first cloud object storage with native support to store and query vector data. You can use it to help you reduce the total cost of storing and querying vectors by up to 90% when compared to specialized vector database solutions.

Since we announced the preview of S3 Vectors in July, I’ve been impressed by how quickly you adopted this new capability to store and query vector data. In just over four months, you created over 250,000 vector indexes and ingested more than 40 billion vectors, performing over 1 billion queries (as of November 28th).

You can now store and search across up to 2 billion vectors in a single index, that’s up to 20 trillion vectors in a vector bucket and a 40x increase from 50 million per index during preview. This means that you can consolidate your entire vector dataset into one index, removing the need to shard across multiple smaller indexes or implement complex query federation logic.

Query performance has been optimized. Infrequent queries continue to return results in under one second, with more frequent queries now resulting in latencies around 100ms or less, making it well-suited for interactive applications such as conversational AI and multi-agent workflows. You can also retrieve up to 100 search results per query, up from 30 previously, providing more comprehensive context for retrieval augmented generation (RAG) applications.

The write performance has also improved substantially, with support for up to 1,000 PUT transactions per second when streaming single-vector updates into your indexes, delivering significantly higher write throughput for small batch sizes. This higher throughput supports workloads where new data must be immediately searchable, helping you ingest small data corpora quickly or handle many concurrent sources writing simultaneously to the same index.

The fully serverless architecture removes infrastructure overhead—there’s no infrastructure to set up or resources to provision. You pay for what you use as you store and query vectors. This AI-ready storage provides you with quick access to any amount of vector data to support your complete AI development lifecycle, from initial experimentation and prototyping through to large-scale production deployments. S3 Vectors now provides the scale and performance needed for production workloads across AI agents, inference, semantic search, and RAG applications.

Two key integrations that were launched in preview are now generally available. You can use S3 Vectors as a vector storage engine for Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Base. In particular, you can use it to build RAG applications with production-grade scale and performance. Moreover, S3 Vectors integration with Amazon OpenSearch is now generally available, so that you can use S3 Vectors as your vector storage layer while using OpenSearch for search and analytics capabilities.

You can now use S3 Vectors in 14 AWS Regions, expanding from five AWS Regions during the preview.

**Let’s see how it works **In this post, I demonstrate how to use S3 Vectors through the AWS Console and CLI.

First, I create an S3 Vector bucket and an index.

echo "Creating S3 Vector bucket..."
aws s3vectors create-vector-bucket \
--vector-bucket-name "$BUCKET_NAME"

echo "Creating vector index..."
aws s3vectors create-index \
--vector-bucket-name "$BUCKET_NAME" \
--index-name "$INDEX_NAME" \
--data-type "float32" \
--dimension "$DIMENSIONS" \
--distance-metric "$DISTANCE_METRIC" \
--metadata-configuration "nonFilterableMetadataKeys=AMAZON_BEDROCK_TEXT,AMAZON_BEDROCK_METADATA"

The dimension metric must match the dimension of the model used to compute the vectors. The distance metric indicates to the algorithm to compute the distance between vectors. S3 Vectors supports cosine and euclidian distances.

I can also use the console to create the bucket. We’ve added the capability to configure encryption parameters at creation time. By default, indexes use the bucket-level encryption, but I can override bucket-level encryption at the index level with a custom AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) key.

I also can add tags for the vector bucket and vector index. Tags at the vector index help with access control and cost allocation.

And I can now manage Properties and Permissions directly in the console.

Similarly, I define Non-filterable metadata and I configure Encryption parameters for the vector index.

Next, I create and store the embeddings (vectors). For this demo, I ingest my constant companion: the AWS Style Guide. This is an 800-page document that describes how to write posts, technical documentation, and articles at AWS.

I use Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases to ingest the PDF document stored on a general purpose S3 bucket. Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases reads the document and splits it in pieces called chunks. Then, it computes the embeddings for each chunk with the Amazon Titan Text Embeddings model and it stores the vectors and their metadata on my newly created vector bucket. The detailed steps for that process are out of the scope of this post, but you can read the instructions in the documentation.

When querying vectors, you can store up to 50 metadata keys per vector, with up to 10 marked as non-filterable. You can use the filterable metadata keys to filter query results based on specific attributes. Therefore, you can combine vector similarity search with metadata conditions to narrow down results. You can also store more non-filterable metadata for larger contextual information. Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases computes and stores the vectors. It also adds large metadata (the chunk of the original text). I exclude this metadata from the searchable index.

There are other methods to ingest your vectors. You can try the S3 Vectors Embed CLI, a command line tool that helps you generate embeddings using Amazon Bedrock and store them in S3 Vectors through direct commands. You can also use S3 Vectors as a vector storage engine for OpenSearch.

Now I’m ready to query my vector index. Let’s imagine I wonder how to write “open source”. Is it “open-source”, with a hyphen, or “open source” without a hyphen? Should I use uppercase or not? I want to search the relevant sections of the AWS Style Guide relative to “open source.”

# 1. Create embedding request
echo '{"inputText":"Should I write open source or open-source"}' | base64 | tr -d '\n' > body_encoded.txt

# 2. Compute the embeddings with Amazon Titan Embed model
aws bedrock-runtime invoke-model \
--model-id amazon.titan-embed-text-v2:0 \
--body "$(cat body_encoded.txt)" \
embedding.json

# Search the S3 Vectors index for similar chunks
vector_array=$(cat embedding.json | jq '.embedding') && \
aws s3vectors query-vectors \
--index-arn "$S3_VECTOR_INDEX_ARN" \
--query-vector "{\"float32\": $vector_array}" \
--top-k 3 \
--return-metadata \
--return-distance | jq -r '.vectors[] | "Distance: \(.distance) | Source: \(.metadata."x-amz-bedrock-kb-source-uri" | split("/")[-1]) | Text: \(.metadata.AMAZON_BEDROCK_TEXT[0:100])..."'

The first result shows this JSON:

{
"key": "348e0113-4521-4982-aecd-0ee786fa4d1d",
"metadata": {
"x-amz-bedrock-kb-data-source-id": "0SZY6GYPVS",
"x-amz-bedrock-kb-source-uri": "s3://sst-aws-docs/awsstyleguide.pdf",
"AMAZON_BEDROCK_METADATA": "{\"createDate\":\"2025-10-21T07:49:38Z\",\"modifiedDate\":\"2025-10-23T17:41:58Z\",\"source\":{\"sourceLocation\":\"s3://sst-aws-docs/awsstyleguide.pdf\"",
"AMAZON_BEDROCK_TEXT": "[redacted] open source (adj., n.) Two words. Use open source as an adjective (for example, open source software), or as a noun (for example, the code throughout this tutorial is open source). Don't use open-source, opensource, or OpenSource. [redacted]",
"x-amz-bedrock-kb-document-page-number": 98.0
},
"distance": 0.63120436668396
}

It finds the relevant section in the AWS Style Guide. I must write “open source” without a hyphen. It even retrieved the page number in the original document to help me cross-check the suggestion with the relevant paragraph in the source document.

**One more thing **S3 Vectors has also expanded its integration capabilities. You can now use AWS CloudFormation to deploy and manage your vector resources, AWS PrivateLink for private network connectivity, and resource tagging for cost allocation and access control.

**Pricing and availability **S3 Vectors is now available in 14 AWS Regions, adding Asia Pacific (Mumbai, Seoul, Singapore, Tokyo), Canada (Central), and Europe (Ireland, London, Paris, Stockholm) to the existing five Regions from preview (US East (Ohio, N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Sydney), and Europe (Frankfurt))

Amazon S3 Vectors pricing is based on three dimensions. PUT pricing is calculated based on the logical GB of vectors you upload, where each vector includes its logical vector data, metadata, and key. Storage costs are determined by the total logical storage across your indexes. Query charges include a per-API charge plus a $/TB charge based on your index size (excluding non-filterable metadata). As your index scales beyond 100,000 vectors, you benefit from lower $/TB pricing. As usual, the Amazon S3 pricing page has the details.

To get started with S3 Vectors, visit the Amazon S3 console. You can create vector indexes, start storing your embeddings, and begin building scalable AI applications. For more information, check out the Amazon S3 User Guide or the AWS CLI Command Reference.

I look forward to seeing what you build with these new capabilities. Please share your feedback through AWS re:Post or your usual AWS Support contacts.

— seb