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Prerequisites

Progress checklist

Finish Install tooling first. This page covers the AWS account shape and Express constraints before you create resources.

This lab creates billable resources: a dedicated VPC, two S3 buckets (Standard + directory-bucket
S3 bucket type that hosts the S3 Express One Zone storage class. Names follow bucket-base-name--zone-id--x-s3 and live in a single Availability Zone.
), an IAM role/instance profile, and an m7g.large EC2 instance running the harness
Docker container on the lab EC2 instance that continuously GETs the same keys from Express and Standard, exposes a dashboard on :8080, and reports p50/p90 latency ratios.
.

PieceNotes
ToolingAWS CLI ≥ 2.15.0 (latest fine), jq — see Install tooling
AWS accountOperator credentials with permission to create VPC, endpoints, buckets, IAM, and EC2
Named profileAWS_PROFILE=sandboxdemo.sh refuses an implicit account
RegionLab Region is ap-southeast-2
Express AZOnly apse2-az1
Availability Zone ID — a unique, account-stable identifier such as apse2-az1. Directory bucket names and Express location config use the AZ ID, not the account-local AZ name (for example ap-southeast-2a).
in Sydney — place subnet + EC2 there
  • Directory buckets need both gateway endpoints: com.amazonaws.ap-southeast-2.s3 and com.amazonaws.ap-southeast-2.s3express.
  • Co-locate compute with the Express AZ ID. Crossing AZs adds latency and defeats the bakeoff.
  • Zonal object operations need CreateSession
    s3express:CreateSession — session-based auth for zonal (object-level) operations on a directory bucket. The SDK or CLI obtains temporary credentials scoped to that bucket before GET/PUT/LIST.
    on the instance role.
Terminal window
export AWS_PROFILE=sandbox
export AWS_REGION=ap-southeast-2
aws sts get-caller-identity
aws --version
# expect aws-cli/2.15.0 or newer (latest fine)

Looks like (placeholder account):

{
"UserId": "AROAEXAMPLE:session-name",
"Account": "123456789012",
"Arn": "arn:aws:sts::123456789012:assumed-role/AWSReservedSSO_…/you"
}

Continue to Architecture, then the CLI overview.