How to access a public S3 bucket from another AWS account?

Question

In one of the blog post, the author has mentioned that he uploaded dataset into a s3 bucket and gave public access.

s3://us-east-1.elasticmapreduce.samples/flightdata/input

Now I want to download/see the data from my chrome browser.

When I copy paste above link in chrome address bar it is asking for:

1. Access key ID
2. Secret access key

What should I give here?

Did the author initially made it public and now made it private? (I am confused)

Also can we access these kind of URLs that start with s3:// directly from browsers?

Should I need to have a AWS account to access these S3 buckets?

(I know we can access web data using http protocol.. http://)

Afterdeck

Answer 1

The Amazon S3 management console allows you to view buckets belonging to your account. It is not possible to view S3 buckets belonging to other accounts within the S3 console.

You can, however, access them via the AWS Command-Line Interface (CLI). For example:

aws s3 ls s3://us-east-1.elasticmapreduce.samples/flightdata/input/

You can also copy files from other buckets by using aws s3 cp and aws s3 sync.

These calls require a set of valid AWS credentials (Access Key and Secret Key), which can be stored in the credentials files via the aws configure command. You do not need specific permission to access public buckets, but you do need permission to use S3 in general. You can obtain an Access Key and Secret Key in the IAM management console where your IAM User is defined. (Or, if you do not have permission to view it, ask your AWS administrator for the Access Key and Secret Key.)

Consonantal

OMG!!! lot of info in your answer!! Thank you, exploring all S3 info now, able to download files with s3 CLI.. – Afterdeck

one more question please,.. what is the difference between these two.. [link] (s3.amazonaws.com/elasticmapreduce/samples/wordcount/input/) [link] (s3://us-east-1.elasticmapreduce.samples/flightdata/input/) they both seems to be URLs and also is s3 a protocol like http? @john-rotenstein – Afterdeck

s3 is not a protocol, but many systems recognise the prefix and know how to access data via the normal Amazon S3 API. Your first link is an HTTP URL. Your second link references an S3 bucket, but won't work in a web browser. – Consonantal