S3 overview
The Glean Amazon S3 connector indexes text-based objects from your buckets so they are searchable in Glean. It supports common office formats, PDFs, and plain text. Glean can run on GCP or AWS; IAM setup differs slightly by platform. Results can use indexed text and metadata, or optional time-limited pre-signed URLs.
Supported features and limitations
The connector reads from the buckets you specify. Platform-specific authentication is covered under Requirements and Setup.
Supported objects
You can index the following file types from S3:
- Microsoft Word
- Microsoft PowerPoint
- Microsoft Excel
- Plain text and similar text-based formats
Supported behavior
- Full-corpus indexing for supported document types.
- Search over indexed S3 content in Glean.
- Optional display of objects using time-limited pre-signed URLs.
Limitations
- Client-side encrypted objects and similar encryption modes are not supported for indexing.
- Objects larger than 64 MB are skipped.
- S3 permissions are not enforced in Glean. Everyone who can use Glean in your organization can see anything that was indexed from S3.
- Only the listed file types are indexed; other types are ignored.
- OCR is disabled for S3 content by default. Text within scanned documents or image-based PDFs is not extracted or indexed during the crawl.
OCR behavior varies by feature. While Glean does not run OCR on S3 content during a crawl, it is enabled by default for direct file uploads in Chat. As a result, the same scanned PDF may yield results in Chat but not in Search. To enable OCR for your S3 connector, contact Glean Support.
Crawling strategy
| Crawl type | Full crawl | Incremental crawl | People data | Activity | Update rate | Webhook | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| S3 connector | Scheduled scan of configured bucket(s) | Picks up new or modified objects since last crawl | N/A | Additions, updates, and deletes reflected via crawl cycle | Tunable schedule | N/A | Deletions appear after the next full crawl; no webhooks |
Data and metadata ingested
- Document content (supported types)
- Metadata such as name, path, and last modified time
Permission behavior
S3 ACLs and bucket policies are not replayed inside Glean. Indexed documents are visible to everyone who can use Glean in your organization.
Security notes
- Access uses a cross-account IAM role (AWS-hosted) or federated web identity (GCP-hosted), with read-only scope to listed buckets.
- After content is indexed, Glean does not re-check S3 ACLs on every search—plan what you put in the allowlist accordingly.
Additional limitations
- Multi-instance setups need separate roles and bucket allowlists per instance.
- The connector does not offer per-user S3 permission mirroring.
Privacy
Anyone in the organization who can use Glean can search indexed S3 documents.