Amazon S3 Glacier
Amazon S3 Glacier is a low-cost object storage service for archiving and backup. It’s designed for long-term data storage, offering durability and cost-effectiveness.
Key Features
- Durability: The same as Amazon S3 standard, with 11 nines.
- Cost: Depends on the tier. Standard is about 0.4 cents per gigabyte, and the deep archive tier is 0.099 cents per gigabyte.
- Archives and Vaults: Each item in Glacier is called an archive, which can be up to 40 terabytes. Archives are stored in vaults.
- Encryption: All data is encrypted at rest using AES-256, with keys managed by AWS.
Operations
- Create and Delete Vaults: Vaults can only be deleted when they’re empty.
- Retrieve Metadata: You can retrieve metadata from your vaults, such as the creation date, number of archives, and total size of all the archives.
- Download Inventory: You can download the inventory of your vault, which is a list of all the archives units, including the archive ID, the creation date, the size, etc.
- Upload Files: Files can be uploaded directly into Glacier or by parts for larger archives.
- Download Files: Files can be downloaded directly from your vault after a retrieval job.
- Delete Archives: Specific archives can be deleted.
Retrieval Options
| Option |
Time Interval |
Cost per Gigabyte |
Cost per 1000 Requests |
| Expedited |
1-5 minutes |
3 cents |
$10 |
| Standard |
3-5 hours |
1 cent |
3 cents |
| Bulk |
5-12 hours |
0.25 cents |
2.50 cents |
Vault Policies and Vault Lock
- Vault Access Policy: Behaves like an S3 bucket policy, allowing you to restrict user and account permissions.
- Vault Lock Policy: Allows you to lock your files in your Glacier vaults for regulatory and compliance requirements. The policy is immutable and cannot be changed once it’s locked.
