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S3 Storage Classess

  • Amazon S3 Standard - General Purpose
  • Amazon S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (IA)
  • Amazon S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access
  • Amazon S3 Intelligent Tiering
  • Amazon Glacier
  • Amazon Glacier Deep Archive
  • Amazon S3 Reduced Redundancy Storage

Amazon S3 Standard - General Purpose

  • High durability (99.99999999999%) of objects across multiple AZ
  • If you store 10,000,000 objects with Amazon S3, you can on average expect to incur a loss of a single object once every 10,000 years
  • 99.99% availability over a given year

  • Sustain 2 concurrent facility failures

  • Use Cases: Big Data analytics, mobile & haming applications, content distribution...

Amazon S3 Standard - Infrequent Access (IA)

  • Suitable for data that is less frequently accessed, but requires rapid access when needed
  • High durability (99.99999999999%) of objects across multiple AZs
  • 99.99% availability
  • Low cost compared to Amazon S3 Standard

  • Sustain 2 concurrent facility failures

  • Use cases: As a data store for disaster recovery, backups

Amazon S3 One Zone - Infrequent Access (IA)

  • Same as IA but data is stored in a single AZ
  • High durability (99.99999999999%) of objects ub a single AZ, data lost when AZ is destroyed
  • 99.5% Availability
  • Low latency and high throughput performance
  • Supports SLL for data at transit and encryption at rest
  • Low cost compared to IA (by 20%)
  • Use Cases: Storing secondary beckup copies of on-premise data, or storing data you can recreate.

Amazon S3 Intelligent Tiering

  • Same low latency and high throughput performance of S3 Standard
  • Small monthly monitoring and auto-tiering fee
  • Automatically moves objects between two access tiers based on changing access patterns
  • Designed for durability of 99.99999999999% of objects across multiple availability zones
  • Reslilient against events that impact an entire Availability Zone
  • Designed for 99.9% availability over a given year

Amazon S3 Glacier

  • Low cost object storage meant for archiving / backups
  • Data is retained for the longer term (10s of years)
  • Alternative to on-premise magnetic tape storage
  • Average anual durability is 99.99999999999%
  • Cost per storage per month ($0.004 / GB) + retrieval cost
  • Each item in Glacier is called "Archive" (up to 40TB)
  • Archives are stored in "Vaults"

Amazon Glacier & Glacier Deep Archive

  • Amazon Glacier - 3 retrieval options:

    • Expedited (1 to 5 minutes)
    • Standard (3 to 5 hours)
    • Bulk (5 to 12 hours)
    • Minimum storage duration of 90 days

  • Amazon Glacier Deep Archive - for long term storage - cheaper

    • Standard (12 hours)
    • Bulk (48 hours)
    • Minimum storage duration of 180 days

S3 Storage Classes Comparison

We can see the comparison of the classes here: https://aws.amazon.com/s3/storage-classes/