What does Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) primarily offer?

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is primarily known for being an object storage service that allows users to store and retrieve virtually any amount of data from anywhere on the web, at any time. This flexibility is one of its hallmark features, as it can handle a wide variety of data types, including images, videos, backup files, and more, without being limited by size or format.

The service is designed to provide high durability, availability, and scalability, making it suitable for both small and large-scale applications. S3 uses a flat storage architecture and organizes data in "buckets," which are containers for storing objects. This ensures that data can be easily accessed over the internet using a simple web service interface.

The other options represent different AWS services. For instance, virtual server hosting is related to Amazon EC2, which offers compute resources rather than object storage. The relational database service, which has predefined schemas, is known as Amazon RDS, specifically designed for structured data storage with table-based formats. The content delivery network (CDN) option refers to Amazon CloudFront, which is used to distribute content globally but does not directly provide storage capabilities like S3 does.