How to handle HTTP 503 response failure in S3

Prerequisite Knowledge

An HTTP 503 response is an error that is displayed when a "service is unavailable".

Identification of S3 usage

Use S3 buckets as a file sharing system

Amazon S3 PUT or DELETE object requests to versioning enabled buckets

Guess the cause

Possibly more than one object with millions of versions

When there are millions of versions of an object, Amazon S3 automatically adjusts requests to buckets to protect users from excessive request traffic

one's grasp of the situation

Significant increase in HTTP 503 responses to Amazon S3 requests to versioning enabled buckets

support

Use the Amazon S3 inventory tool to generate a report that provides a flat file list of objects in the bucket

Enable the "NonCurrentVersion" expiration policy and the "ExpiredObjectDeleteMarker" policy in Lifecycle Management and

Delete markers that expire previous versions of the object and have no associated data object in the bucket.