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AWS Brings 'Intelligent' Storage to Elastic File System
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has added its "Intelligent-Tiering" feature to the Elastic File System service, letting users take better advantage of lower-priced storage classes in EFS.
Intelligent-Tiering automates moving items from a regular-priced storage tier to a lower-priced one if it notices a change in how frequently that item is accessed. Regular storage tiers are typically meant for objects that are accessed frequently and regularly. Lower-priced tiers are the preferred choice for objects that are accessed infrequently or irregularly. Instead of having users manually move objects from one tier to another, Intelligent-Tiering does it automatically.
Intelligent-Tiering is now available to all EFS users as of Thursday, according to a blog post by Channy Yun, principal developer advocate at AWS.
"Today, we are launching Amazon EFS Intelligent-Tiering, a new EFS lifecycle management feature that automatically optimizes costs for shared file storage when data access patterns change, without operational overhead," he wrote.
Intelligent-Tiering will move objects across all four EFS storage levels:
- EFS Standard: For data stored in multiple availability zones
- EFS Standard-Infrequent Access (IA): For Standard data that's infrequently or irregularly accessed
- Amazon EFS One Zone: For data stored redundantly in a single availability zone
- Amazon EFS One Zone-Infrequent Access (IA): For One Zone data that's infrequently or irregularly accessed
The IA storage levels above cost less than their counterparts. They're meant for files that haven't been accessed for anywhere between seven and 90 days, depending on an organization's lifecycle policy. They're a cost-effective option for less-critical files. However, customers can incur extra charges if files in IA are accessed more frequently than they're meant to be -- for instance, if they forgot to move it to the Standard tier.
"With EFS Intelligent-Tiering, lifecycle management monitors the access patterns of your file system and moves files that have not been accessed for the duration of the lifecycle policy from EFS Standard or EFS One Zone to EFS Standard-IA or EFS One Zone-IA, depending on whether your file system uses EFS Standard or EFS One Zone storage classes," Yun said. "If the file is accessed again, it is moved back to EFS Standard or EFS One Zone storage classes."
More information on Intelligent-Tiering for EFS is available here.
Intelligent-Tiering for Amazon S3 Updated
In a separate announcement, AWS also described two new capabilities in the Intelligent-Tiering feature for Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3).
"To date, S3 Intelligent-Tiering was intended for objects larger than 128 KB stored for a minimum of 30 days. As of today, monitoring and automation charges will no longer be collected for objects smaller than 128 KB -- this includes both new and already existing objects in the S3 Intelligent-Tiering storage class," wrote Sean M. Tracey in a blog post.
"Additionally, objects deleted, transitioned, or overwritten within 30 days will no longer accrue prorated charges."
More information on Intelligent-Tiering for S3 is available here.