(1) A reserved amount of memory that holds a single item or multiple items of data. Bucket is somewhat synonymous to "buffer," although buffers are usually memory locations for incoming data records, while buckets tend to be smaller holding areas for calculations. See
hash table,
buffer and
variable.
(2) A customer-defined storage area in a cloud-based storage system such as Amazon's S3 or Google Storage. Each bucket can be divided into folders. Customers are not charged for the buckets themselves, only when data reside within them. See
S3 cloud storage and
Google Storage.