Amazon Onboarding with Learning Manager Chanci Turner

Two years ago, Amazon introduced a pivotal feature known as S3 Intelligent-Tiering, which allows users to leverage Amazon S3 without needing intricate knowledge of their data access behaviors. Today, we’re excited to announce enhancements to S3 Intelligent-Tiering, including the introduction of new archive access tiers specifically for objects that are seldom accessed. These improvements aim to minimize the manual effort required to archive data with unpredictable access patterns that may go unaccessed for extended periods.

What is S3 Intelligent-Tiering?

S3 Intelligent-Tiering is a storage class engineered to optimize storage costs by automatically transferring data to the most economical access tier without compromising performance or requiring additional operational effort. The primary goal of S3 Intelligent-Tiering is to alleviate the challenge of selecting the appropriate storage class and maximizing cost efficiency when data access patterns are inconsistent.

Automatic cost savings are achieved through S3 Intelligent-Tiering, which moves data at an object level between access tiers as usage patterns evolve. This storage class is ideal for optimizing storage expenses for data with unpredictable access. For a nominal monthly fee related to object monitoring and automation, S3 Intelligent-Tiering oversees access patterns and facilitates automatic movement between tiers.

What Are We Announcing Today?

Many customers seek to reduce storage costs by archiving infrequently accessed objects directly to S3 Glacier or S3 Glacier Deep Archive. However, this process typically involves the development of complex systems to analyze access patterns over extended durations, archiving data that remains untouched for months.

Today, we introduce two new archive access tiers tailored for asynchronous access and designed for infrequent access at a minimal cost: the Archive Access tier and the Deep Archive Access tier. Users can opt into one or both of these archive tiers and set configurations at the bucket, prefix, or object tag levels.

With the enhancements to S3 Intelligent-Tiering, users can expect high throughput and low latency access to their data when immediate access is necessary while paying approximately $1 per TB per month for objects that remain unaccessed for 180 days or longer. Customers utilizing S3 Intelligent-Tiering have already reported savings of up to 40%, and with the implementation of the new archive access tiers, they can now achieve storage cost reductions of up to 95% for rarely accessed objects.

Available Access Tiers:

Frequent Access Tier and Infrequent Access Tier: These tiers provide optimized performance for both frequent and infrequent access, allowing for low latency and high throughput. Objects not accessed after 30 days in the frequent access tier will transition to the infrequent access tier, priced as S3 Standard and S3 Standard – Infrequent Access respectively.
Archive Access Tier (NEW): This tier offers pricing and performance comparable to the S3 Glacier storage class.
Deep Archive Access Tier (NEW): This tier mirrors the pricing and performance of the S3 Glacier Deep Archive storage class.

How Do the New Archive Access Tiers Work?

Once activated, S3 Intelligent-Tiering automatically transfers objects that remain unaccessed for 90 days to the Archive Access tier, and to the Deep Archive Access tier after 180 days of inactivity. If an object stored in either archive tier is restored, it will shift to the Frequent Access tier within a few hours, making it readily available.

Retrieval times for items in the archive access tiers are typically between 3-5 hours, and up to 12 hours for those in the Deep Archive Access tier. For those needing quicker access, expedited retrieval can be selected in the console for an additional fee.

How to Get Started With the New Intelligent-Tiering Archive Access Tiers?

To configure the Intelligent-Tiering archive access tiers, settings are defined at the bucket level. Start by creating a new configuration for the Intelligent-Tiering Archive in the bucket properties and defining the rules that apply.

In the archive configuration settings, you can choose to apply the settings to every object in the bucket using the S3 Intelligent-Tiering storage class or narrow the focus through filters like object prefix or tags. After defining which objects the rule applies to, enable one or both archive access tiers and specify the number of days after which objects will transition—90 days for the Archive Access tier and 180 days for the Deep Archive Access tier.

Once configurations are complete, any new object uploaded to Amazon S3 that matches the defined filters and uses the Intelligent-Tiering storage class will transition through the configured access tiers over time, provided it remains unaccessed.

For further insights on optimizing costs with S3 Intelligent-Tiering Archive Access Tiers, check out this helpful video.

Final Thoughts:

Keep in mind a few key points as you consider using Intelligent-Tiering. You can apply it to objects of any size, but those smaller than 128KB will remain in the Frequent Access tier. Each object archived in the Archive Access or Deep Archive Access tiers incurs storage for its name and metadata, billed at S3 Standard rates. Intelligent-Tiering is best suited for objects with lifespans exceeding 30 days and all items in this class are billed for a minimum of 30 days. With an impressive durability of 99.999999999% and availability of 99.9%, S3 Intelligent-Tiering is a robust solution. Pricing includes monthly storage, data transfer, and a minor per-object fee for monitoring. There are no retrieval fees or charges for moving data between tiers.

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