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It's complicated. I gave the most expensive pricing, which is their fastest tier and includes stripping across three availability zones and guarantees 11 nines of data durability. Additionally, the easy integration with all other AWS services and the feature richness of S3 buckets makes it hard to do a fair apple to apple comparison unless you really have well defined needs. So I gave the highest price to keep it simple, and for someone who says they just have a few GB, any cost should be trivial.
How much is their cheapest glacier tier? Seems complicated to calculate, seems there’s some relation to s3 storage or I’m just missing something? Haven’t looked that closely.
So you just asked the most confusing thing about AWS service names due to how names changed over time.
Before S3 had an archival tier, there existed a separate service that AWS named AWS Glacier Storage, and then renamed to AWS S3 Glacier.
Around 2012 AWS started adding tiers to S3 which made the standalone service redundant. I received you look at S3 proper unless you have something like a Synology that can directly integrate with the older job based API used by the original glacier service.
So, let's say I have a 1TB archival file, single tarball, and I upload it to a brand new S3 bucket, without version, special features, etc, except it has a life cycle policy to move objects from S3 standard to S3 Glacier instant access after 0 days. So effectively, I upload the file and it moves to Glacier class storage.
The S3 standard is ~$24/tb/month, and lets say worst case scenario our data sits on standard for one whole day before moving.
$0.77+$0.005 (API cost of the put)
Then there is the lifecycle charge to move the data from standard to glacier, with one request per object each way. Since we only have one object the cost is
$0.004 out of standard
$0.02 into glacier
The cost of glacier instant tier is $4.1/tb/month. Since we would be there all but one day, the cost on the first bill would be:
$3.95
The second month onwards you would pay just the $4.1/month unless you are constantly adding or removing.
Let's say six months later you download your 1tb archive file. That would incur a cost of up to $30.
Now I know that seems complicated and expensive. It is, because it is providing services to me in my former role as director of engineering, with complex needs and budgets to pay for stuff. It doesn't make sense as a large-scale backup of personal data, unless you also want to leverage other AWS services, or you are truly just dumping the data away and will likely never need to retrieve it.
S3 is great for complying with HIPAA, feeding data into a cdn, and generally dumping data around in performant way. I've literally dropped a petabyte off data into S3 and it just took it and did its thing.
In my personal AWS account I use S3 as a place to dump cache contents built by lambda functions and served up by API gateway. Doing stuff like that is super cheap. I also use private git repos (code commit), private container registry (ecr), and container host (ECS), and it is nice have all of that stuff just click together.
For backing up my personal computer, I use iDrive personal and OneDrive, where I don't have to worry about the cost per object, etc. iDrive (not an Apple service) let's you backup multiple devices to their platform and keeps them versioned.
Anyway, happy to help answer questions. Have a great day.
Wow. Thank you for that incredibly detailed explanation!!
It does sound like though that it is POTENTIALLY cheaper than something like B2, but also much easier to misconfigure and end up in a more expensive tier.
Seems to me unless you have a reason to use Amazon storage or already have something using it, using it for backup isn’t the best idea.
That's a good takeaway. AWS is the ultimate Swiss army knife, but it is easy to misconfigure. Personally, when you are first learning AWS, I wouldn't put more data in then you are willing to pay for on the most expensive tier. AWS also gives you options to set price alerts, so if you do start playing with it, spend the time to set cost alerts so you know when something is going awry.
Have a great day!