Vercel adds Amazon S3 storage support to marketplace

Amazon S3 is now available natively through the Vercel Marketplace and v0 by Vercel, adding S3 general purpose buckets, S3 Tables and S3 Vectors to Vercel's storage options.

The integration lets developers create and connect Amazon S3 resources from within Vercel instead of configuring storage separately in the AWS console.

It covers three main workloads: object storage for web applications, analytics storage through S3 Tables, and vector storage for AI applications through S3 Vectors. The services join existing AWS integrations on Vercel, including Amazon Aurora, Amazon DynamoDB and Amazon OpenSearch Serverless.

In the Vercel dashboard, developers can create an S3 resource by selecting AWS under the storage tab, choosing a bucket type and region, and attaching the bucket to a project. Vercel then injects environment variables, including the AWS region, role ARN and resource ARN, into the application environment.

The setup uses short-lived credentials rather than long-term access keys. At runtime, Vercel uses an OpenID Connect token exchange with AWS Security Token Service to provide temporary access scoped to the relevant resource.

Three storage types

The launch includes standard S3 buckets for files such as images, video and documents. Those buckets are aimed at workloads including data lakes, cloud-native applications and mobile apps.

S3 Tables targets analytics use cases. Amazon describes it as fully managed Apache Iceberg storage with automated maintenance and compaction, and says it can be queried from engines that support the Iceberg REST catalog API, including DuckDB.

S3 Vectors is aimed at AI workloads such as retrieval-augmented generation and semantic search. It provides native vector storage and query functions without the need for a separate vector database, although developers still need to generate embeddings with their own models.

According to Amazon, S3 Vectors can cut the cost of uploading, storing and querying vectors by up to 90%.

Developer workflow

The integration is intended to keep storage provisioning within the same workflow developers already use to build and deploy applications on Vercel. Previously, teams had to leave the Vercel environment to configure AWS policies and credentials manually, Amazon said.

For object storage, developers can use the AWS SDK in a Next.js route to upload a file to an S3 bucket, then use the same client to list and retrieve objects. For analytics, they can run DuckDB inside a Vercel function, attach an S3 Tables bucket by ARN, and execute SQL queries against Iceberg tables.

For vector search, applications can send an embedding to S3 Vectors and return the closest matches from an index. Amazon says this supports use cases such as document search and AI assistants built on content stored in S3.

v0 support

The services are also available through v0, Vercel's AI-assisted application-building tool. Users can describe an application in natural language and have the relevant S3 resource provisioned automatically, with the connection configured and example code generated, Amazon said.

Examples include a photo gallery using standard S3 storage, a support bot based on PDF files using S3 Vectors, and an analytics dashboard using S3 Tables.

AWS account model

Developers can either create a new AWS account through the integration or link an existing one, according to Amazon. New accounts support S3 features for building and testing, while linked accounts let customers keep existing billing arrangements and use a broader set of AWS services.

If an existing AWS account is linked, Vercel works only with new buckets created through the platform. All S3 resources remain in the customer's own AWS account, allowing storage management through AWS-native tools, Amazon said.

There is no separate charge for the integration itself. Users pay standard Amazon S3 rates for the resources they consume, and new AWS accounts created through Vercel receive USD $100 in credits valid for six months.

The S3 integration is available through v0 and the Vercel Marketplace in all commercial AWS regions supported by Vercel, Amazon said.