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S3 Storage Classes

Updated Jul 26, 2020 ·
NOTES

This is not an exhaustive documentation of all the existing AWS Services. These are summarized notes that I used for the AWS Certifications.

To see the complete documentation, please go to: AWS documentation

Overview​

These are the different S3 Storage Classes:

  • 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
  • AmazonS3 Reduced Redundancy Storage (deprecated)

S3 Standard - General Purpose​

  • High durability (13 nines SLA) of objects across multiple AZ
  • SLA: if we store 10 million objects in S3, we can expect to loose on average a single file per 10K years
  • 99.99% availability per year
  • It can sustain 2 concurrent facility failures

S3 Standard - Infrequent Access​

  • Suitable for data that is less frequently accessed, but it should be retrieved quickly when it is needed
  • Same durability as General Purpose, 99.9% availability
  • Lower cost than General Purpose

S3 One Zone - Infrequent Access​

  • Same as Standard IA, but data is stored in a single AZ
  • Same durability as Standard IA. Data can be lost if an AZ goes down
  • 99.5% availability per year
  • Lower cost than IA

S3 One Zone - Intelligent Tiering​

  • Automatically moves objects between two access tiers based on access patterns
  • Has a small monthly monitoring fee
  • Same durability as General Purpose, having availability of 99.9%

S3 Glacier​

  • Low cost object storage for archiving/backup data
  • Data is retained for longer terms (10s of years)
  • Alternative to on-premise magnetic tape
  • Same durability as General Purpose
  • Cost per storage per month is really low, but we pay for data retrieval as well
  • Each item in Glacier is called an archive, archives are stored in Vaults
  • Provides 3 retrieval options:
    • Expedited (1 to 5 minutes): costs $10
    • Standard (3 to 5 hours)
    • Bulk (5 to 12 hours)
  • Minimum storage duration for Glacier is 90 days

S3 Glacier Deep Archive​

  • For very long term storage - cheaper than S3 Glacier
  • Retrieval options:
    • Standard (12 hours)
    • Bulk (48 hours)
  • Minimum storage duration is 180 days