Amazon S3 storage classes
This article is a continuation of the previous article “Introduction to Amazon S3”. I recommend you to read that article before starting this.
Features of S3 :
- Storage Classes
- Life Cycle Management
- Versioning
- Encryption
- MFA Delete
Storage Classes :
Amazon S3 has different storage classes. When we upload a file into S3 we can choose which storage class is apt for our files. There are 6 types of storage classes.
- Standard
- Intelligent Tiering
- Standard Infrequent Access
- One Zone Infrequent Access
- Glacier
- Glacier Deep Archive
These storage classes are classified into different categories based on
- Storage Cost
- Object Durability
- Object Availability
- Frequency of Access
Difference between the storage classes:
S3 standard:
- S3 have 99.99% availability and 99.99999999999% durability that means The objects in this storage class are highly available and the chance of losing that file is very very rare
- We can store files which we use regularly.
- S3 is the most expensive storage standard among all others.
- The data is stored in multiple locations.
S3 Standard Infrequent Access (IA):
- This is used to store data which is accessed less frequently but need quick access when needed.
- The objects in this storage have 99.90% availability and 99.99999999999% object durability in different locations
- It is less expensive than standard storage.
- Amazon charges a retrieval fee to retrieve the data.
S3 One Zone Infrequently Access:
- This is a low-cost storage option compared to S3 standard storage and Standard Infrequent access.
- This is used to store infrequently accessed non-critical data or data which can be regenerated if lost because this storage class stores the data only in one facility.
- The objects in this storage have 99.5% availability and 99.99999999999% object durability in a single availability zone.
Intelligent Tiering:
- It monitors your data access patterns and moves the data to different storage classes accordingly.
- The objects in this storage have 99.90% availability and 99.99999999999% object durability in different locations.
- Less expensive than standard storage classes.
Glacier and Glacier Deep archive :
- Glacier is used for data archiving
- This is the cheapest storage S3 service
- The data retrieval time can be from minutes to hours.
- Glacier Deep Archive is also used for data archiving but the retrieval time for Deep archive is 12 hours.
- The data durability is 99.99999999999%
We can choose the storage class for our object while uploading or we can edit the storage class by selecting our object from the s3 dashboard. We can only move the object from one storage class to S3 standard, Intelligent Tiering, S3 One Zone IA, S3 IA. If we have to move the object to the glacier or glacier deep archive we have to use Object Life Cycle policies which we will discuss later.
Object Life Cycle Policies:
- Object Life Cycle policies are used to move an object from one storage class to another based on the timeline that we specify.
Lets us more about Object Life Cycle Policies in detail in the next article.
