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AWS Makes It Easier To Sift Through Data in S3 and Glacier Storage
Two new Amazon Web Services (AWS) features unveiled at the re:Invent conference this week aim to make the Amazon S3 and AWS Glacier storage services more useful for analytics.
AWS CEO Andy Jassy introduced the two services, Amazon S3 Select and Glacier Select, on Wednesday during his re:Invent keynote presentation. According to Jassy, Amazon S3 is the industry's most popular service to use for data lakes, but that its users frequently ask for a more efficient way to filter through data so that they only get relevant results on the first go.
Amazon S3 Select aims to solve that issue by "[enabling] applications to retrieve only a subset of data from an object by using simple SQL expressions," explained AWS Senior Technical Evangelist Randall Hunt in a blog post. The result is faster processing times, as well as lower resource utilization costs.
Amazon S3 Select is currently in preview and free to test with sign-up here.
Meanwhile, the new Glacier Select service performs a similar function but for archival storage data. As Jassy explained, Glacier Select lets users run queries directly on data inside Glacier and retrieves only relevant data within minutes.
As Jassy noted in his keynote, this ability to quickly and easily retrieve data from cold storage gives customers the option to use Glacier as part of their data lake, in conjunction with Amazon S3.
Glacier Select is now generally available with pricing based on the volume of data scanned and retrieved. More information is available here.
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