Amazon cloud storage gets multipart upload feature

Uploads to Amazon Web Service's public cloud storage can now be broken into up to 1024 distinct chunks.

AWS's storage cloud Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) began offering the multipart upload feature to customers on Thursday.

It is designed to speed the upload process for objects of between 100mb and 5GB in size, by allowing them to be broken up and uploaded in distinct parts in parallel, AWS said in a blog post. If the uploading of an individual part fails, users can restart the upload process for that specific failed part, rather than for the whole collection.

The free update to S3 is designed to serve two classes of people, according to AWS. Those who have "been forced to repeatedly try to upload a file across an unreliable network connection", and those with a high bandwidth connection that can't be fully exploited when uploading a single, large file.

From November 1st, AWS started offering first-time users of the AWS cloud up to 5GB of free Amazon S3 storage.