The basics of AWS S3 Storage Cost
Amazon Web Services have been leading the market when it comes to the cloud business for a long time now. One of the major contributors to their success is the Simple Storage Service (S3) cloud storage that they offer. S3 is one of the most used cloud storage options because of its ease of availability, the option to scale according to your needs and most importantly the durability it provides.
S3 has been a goto for major organizations and individuals because of the durability and the guarantee that it offers regarding the availability and security of your data. AWS claims that they can provide you with 99.999999999% availability of unlimited storage and uptime. While providing you with all this they do not skimp on security and make sure that your data is safe and secure with major compliances capabilities.
Since AWS offers S3 services all over the world, it has a number of plans according to the needs of people. In this article, we will try to educate you about the different types of S3 storage options and guide you on which one will be the best for your workload. So let us look at the different types of storage options available in S3:
What are the types of S3 storage?
Not everyone is using the AWS platform for professional work or at the enterprise level. For such people, AWS gives a free usage tier option in which you get access to 5GB of S3 storage in the Standard Storage class. To work with this storage AWS gives you 20,000 GET requests and 2,000 PUT requests. In S3 you are required to make storage buckets so that you also get 15 GB of data transfers out of them each month free for one year.
Whenever you use any kind of storage there are certain criteria that guide your decision. This includes how much volume do you actually want to store, how do you plan to access it, what will you add to it, what will you retrieve from it, and the most important factor is how fast can you access your data. All these factors are also there when you choose an S3 storage option. Since organizations have their feet in many countries, they have to also decide where their data is duplicated and how important it is in a particular region because AWS has some cheaper storage options if reliability is not that big of an issue.
So let us have a look at the different kinds of S3 storage types:
S3 standard storage
As the name suggests this is the most standard storage option that is provided by AWS S3. This has a simplified version of payment i.e., you have to only pay for the storage that you are using. The benefit of this storage type is that you get instant access to the data that you have stored on the cloud. This is the ideal storage option for people who have data-driven workflow and for organizations that store customer-generated data like photos and videos.
S3 Intelligent Tiering
There might be some data that initially you use a lot and there is frequent access to it. But after some time you may not need it that often and it is just sitting there costing you money. This is where intelligent tiering comes in and moves that data into the infrequent access tier by frequently monitoring and automating the process of moving data. This helps you save money despite the fact that you have to pay a fee for this monitoring and automation.
S3 infrequent access storage
It is not necessary that you need to frequently access the data that you have stored on the cloud. However, it might be the case that you have to access that data instantly in case something goes wrong or you need some data urgently. To store this type of data, this type of storage option is the best. The main benefit of this storage is that it is cheaper than the S3 standard storage option when it comes to just storing data but to access or retrieve your data, you have to shell out some extra money.
S3 One-Zone Infrequent Access Storage
An organization may have some data that is stored in only one region and they don’t access it frequently. For this kind of storage needs, AWS gives you the option of S3 One-Zone Infrequent Access Storage which is quite cheap. But there’s a catch behind its cheap cost. The reliability of this storage type is compromised because usually data in a region is assigned to three Availability points but to save cost they assign this kind of data to only one Availability point.
S3 Glacier Storage
There is some data that you just have to keep with yourself and can’t get rid of. This may include compliance records and things like that. You don’t have to access that data but you just need to keep it with you. This is where S3 glacier comes into place. It is basically an archive storage option that is very cheap but you don’t get to access that data instantly. You have to wait for a minimum of 5 hours to access the data you store in it.
S3 Glacier Deep Archive
This is an extension of Glacier Storage. This storage option is even cheaper than the standard Glacier storage because this storage option is just like dumping your data and forgetting about it unless there is a very dire need of it. The retrieval time for the data in this storage option is a minimum of 12 hours so this option is just for archival data that you just have to keep for some compliance or something like that.
What are the factors affecting S3 storage prices?
Costs associated with data transferring
When you move data from the internet to your S3 buckets, you don’t have to pay a penny for that. Also, moving data from an S3 bucket to any service is also free. But moving data from your S3 storage to the internet is a different scenario. You will be charged for that according to the amount of data you’re moving. AWS also charges you for moving data from one region to another.
Costs associated with S3 requests
AWS only provides you with PUTS and GETS requests in the free usage tier and that too a limited amount of these requests. For using other requests and exceeding the number of GETS and PUTS requests you have been provided with you have to pay a charge fixed by AWS. This charge depends on the requests and the data it is being applied to.
Costs associated with Transfer Acceleration
If you have to quickly move data between two points that are far from each other, AWS Transfer acceleration can come in handy for you. You don’t have to get in the hassle of using any custom app or protocol. You can get speeds that are six times faster than your current transfer speed. There’s also a caveat with this as you will be charged only when AWS was able to move your data with faster speeds.
There are other options by which you can also leverage accelerated data transfer speeds:
- AWS Snowball is a petabyte-scale information transport arrangement that utilizes devices intended to safely move a lot of information in and out of the AWS Cloud. Essentially make a job in the AWS Management Console and a Snowball device will be dispatched to you automatically. Each activity incorporates the utilization of a Snowball device and for the first 10 days of on-site usage you don’t have to pay anything. From that point forward, there’s a little charge for extra on-location days. Information move into AWS is free, while move out is valued by region. Besides all this, you have to also pay job fees and shipping fees.
- If you have to access direct ports into the AWS data centers that too at a very fast speed, AWS Direct Connect gives you the option to create a dedicated network for that purpose. You have to pay for using this service according to the data you have transferred and also you’re charged hourly for every port. AWS Direct Connect is compatible with a lot of AWS services like S3, EC2, DynamoDB, etc.
- Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose is a handy tool for those people who have a need to stream data as it helps them to store this streamed data into S3 buckets. As the pattern suggests, here also you have to pay for the data that you have used while streaming and the cost is charged by rounding up the data to the nearest 5KB. For example if you use 3232KB of data you will be charged for 3235KB.
How can you manage your S3 costs?
Amazon realizes that since its customers are using the S3 storage services at a large scale and ingesting a huge amount of data they will also need to manage this data. For this, they provide storage management solutions that can help you analyze, manage and tag your data. However, this service is not free and you have to pay for it. AWS CloudWatch and AWS CloudTrail are examples of such services that are initially free of cost but as your usage and management increases they start charging you. For the better usage of your S3 environment, AWS has given its users tools like S3 Inventory, S3 Object Tagging, and S3 analytics which help them in managing their S3 storage.
Need more help?
At Opslyft we are a team of young professionals and we take pride in being experts in Amazon Web Services. We can help you choose the right type of S3 storage and with that, we can even help you manage your S3 storage and make your workflow efficient and in this trying times help you cut down your AWS cloud bills. With the help of our AIOps framework, we optimize the infrastructure of organizations and help them cut costs.
