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AWS S3 Adds Storage Option for Rarely Accessed Data
Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently announced several improvements related to its Simple Storage Service (S3), including an expansion of its Intelligent-Tiering option to accommodate archival data.
AWS introduced S3 Intelligent-Tiering two years ago this month to give S3 users a more cost-effective storage class for data with unpredictable access requirements. Within the S3 Intelligent-Tiering option are two different data tiers -- one for data that's accessed frequently and one for data that's accessed infrequently.
The service automatically moves data objects from one tier to the other depending on how often users within an organization request access. If an object hasn't been accessed for 30 days, it gets moved to the infrequent access tier. It gets moved back to the frequent access tier once it gets accessed again. This process is designed to optimize storage costs for data that only needs to be accessed infrequently, irregularly or both.
This week, AWS announced an expansion of S3 Intelligent-Tiering. Two new tiers, Archive Access and Deep Archive Access, are now available for data that is accessed very rarely. The former tier is designed for data that hasn't been accessed in 90 days, and the latter for data that hasn't been accessed for 180 days. S3 Intelligent-Tiering will move data from one tier to the other as needed.
The cost benefits from using S3 Intelligent-Tiering are described in a blog post by Marcia Villalba, AWS senior developer advocate:
You pay for monthly storage, request and data transfer. When using Intelligent-Tiering you pay for a small monthly per-object fee for monitoring and automation. There is no retrieval fee in S3 Intelligent-Tiering and no fee for moving data between tiers. Objects in the Frequent Access tier are billed at the same rate as S3 Standard, objects stored in the Infrequent Access tier are billed at the same rate as S3 Standard Infrequent Access, objects stored in the Archive Access tier are billed at the same rate as S3 Glacier and objects stored in the Deep Archive access tier are billed at the same rate as S3 Deep Glacier.
AWS announced a few other S3-related enhancements this week: