# Amazon S3 Now Supports PrivateLink for FIPS Endpoints!

Hi, I'm Shii-chan!

Today I found a security and compliance focused announcement from AWS's What's New, so let's dig in.

## What was announced?

According to AWS's What's New, Amazon S3 now supports AWS PrivateLink for endpoints validated under the Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-3 program.

Organizations with security and compliance requirements can now connect to S3 using FIPS-validated cryptographic modules while keeping their traffic inside their Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). This is great news if you work with US federal agencies or in a regulated industry where FIPS-compliant cryptographic modules are required.

## The story so far

Until now, you could already use AWS PrivateLink to connect to S3 privately within your VPC, but there was no way to use FIPS 140-3 validated endpoints over PrivateLink. For organizations that needed FIPS compliance, it was hard to get both the convenience of private connectivity and the cryptographic module certification requirements at the same time.

## What changes

With this update, organizations that require FIPS 140-3 compliance can now access S3 entirely within their VPC, without traversing the internet. The key point is that you can now satisfy both "private connectivity" and "FIPS-compliant encryption" at once. If you work with US federal workloads, or in a heavily regulated field like finance or healthcare, this gives you a new configuration option for S3.

## Dive Deep

Setup is straightforward: create a new interface VPC endpoint for S3, or edit an existing one, and configure it to use the FIPS S3 endpoint.

It's available in the following seven regions:

- US East (N. Virginia)
- US East (Ohio)
- US West (N. California)
- US West (Oregon)
- Canada (Central)
- Canada West (Calgary)
- AWS GovCloud (US)

There's no additional cost for this feature. For more on setup and on FIPS 140-3 itself, AWS points to the AWS PrivateLink documentation and the FIPS 140-3 Compliance page.

## Wrap-up

- Amazon S3 now supports FIPS 140-3 validated endpoints over AWS PrivateLink
- You can connect to S3 with FIPS-validated cryptographic modules while keeping traffic inside your VPC
- It's available in seven regions: US East/West, two Canada regions, and AWS GovCloud (US)
- No extra cost — just configure a new or existing interface VPC endpoint to use the FIPS S3 endpoint

This is worth checking out if you run S3 workloads for US federal agencies or in a regulated industry that requires FIPS-compliant cryptographic modules.