Cross-Region S3 URL Patterns

S3 URLs Across AWS Regions

AWS operates S3 in dozens of regions worldwide. The URL format varies slightly depending on the region, and some regions have special endpoint formats.

Standard Regional URLs

US East (N. Virginia) — us-east-1:

https://bucket.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/key
https://bucket.s3.amazonaws.com/key  (us-east-1 is the default)

EU (Frankfurt) — eu-central-1:

https://bucket.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/key

Asia Pacific (Tokyo) — ap-northeast-1:

https://bucket.s3.ap-northeast-1.amazonaws.com/key

Legacy Dash-Format Endpoints

Some older documentation and tools use a dash instead of a dot between s3 and the region:

https://bucket.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/key

This format is equivalent to:

https://bucket.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/key

Both work, but the dot format is recommended.

Region-Specific Considerations

Region	Special Notes
us-east-1	Default region; global endpoint resolves here
cn-north-1	China (Beijing) — uses .amazonaws.com.cn domain
cn-northwest-1	China (Ningxia) — uses .amazonaws.com.cn domain
us-gov-west-1	GovCloud — uses .amazonaws.com but separate partition
us-gov-east-1	GovCloud East — separate partition (aws-us-gov)

China Region URLs

https://bucket.s3.cn-north-1.amazonaws.com.cn/key

GovCloud Region URLs

https://bucket.s3.us-gov-west-1.amazonaws.com/key

Transfer Acceleration URLs

S3 Transfer Acceleration uses a special endpoint:

https://bucket.s3-accelerate.amazonaws.com/key

This routes data through AWS CloudFront edge locations for faster uploads from distant locations.