Easy Ways to Save
Learn about some often overlooked ways to save AWS costs.
We'll cover the following...
In this lesson, we'll cover some very easy ways to save, which might not be so obvious.
S3 storage tiers
Using the proper storage solution for our situation can significantly impact our costs. New objects uploaded to S3 will be placed in the S3 Standard storage tier by default. This is an excellent general-purpose tier that has very robust reliability but is generally the most costly overall. The table below describes the S3 storage tier options and where they might be best used.
Comparison of S3 Storage Tiers
Storage Tier | Description | Best Used For | Per GB Price (US-WEST-2) |
S3 Standard | Designed for frequently accessed objects with low latency and high throughput | Content distribution, websites | $0.023 |
S3 Infrequent Access | General purpose storage for seldom-accessed objects, lower storage price but with a retrieval fee | Disaster recovery, backups | $0.0125 |
S3 Intelligent Tiering | Automatically moves objects between storage tiers based on their actual usage | Data lakes, data with unknown access patterns | $0.023 + $0.0025 per 1000 objects monitored |
S3 One Zone Infrequent Access | Infrequently accessed data that is hosted in just one AZ | Non-critical logs, data that can be recreated easily | $0.01 |
S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval | Long-term archival storage with instant retrieval | Accessed only about once a quarter | $0.004 |
S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval | Long-term archival storage with retrieval times from minutes to hours with an option for expedited retrieval | Archives that do not need instant access | $0.0036 |
S3 Glacier Deep Archive | Long-term archival storage with retrieval times that can take hours | Accessed only once or two times a year | $0.00099 |
Now, S3 pricing can get pretty complex, with different tiers having different retrieval costs. For example, S3 Standard will cost $0.005 per 1000 PUT requests (i.e., uploads). In contrast, S3 Standard Infrequent Access will charge $0.01 for 1000 uploads. This is beyond the monthly per GB storage cost, but notice that S3 Infrequent Access has a monthly storage cost that is half of the cost incurred by S3 Standard. So, depending on our access patterns and needs, we need to think a little bit when selecting our storage tiers. If we truly ...