Amazon S3 Glacier
![Amazon S3 Glacier](/images/blog/amazon-s3-glacier.webp)
What is Amazon S3 Glacier?
Amazon S3 Glacier is a web service with vaults that offer long-term data archiving and data backup.
It is the cheapest S3 storage class and offers 99.999999999% of data durability.
It helps to retain unlimited data like photos, videos, documents as TAR or ZIP file,
data lakes, analytics, IoT, machine learning, and compliance data.
S3-Standard, S3 Standard-IA, and S3 Glacier storage classes, objects, or data are automatically stored across availability zones in a specific region.
S3 Glacier provides the following data retrieval options:
● Expedited retrievals -
○ It retrieves data in 1-5 minutes.
● Standard retrievals -
○ It retrieves data between 3-5 hours.
● Bulk retrievals -
○ It retrieves data between 5-12 hours.
Features:
● It integrates with AWS IAM to allow vaults to grant permissions to the users.
● It integrates with AWS CloudTrail to log and monitor API call activities for auditing.
● A vault is a place for storing archives with certain functionalities like to create, delete, lock, list, retrieve, tag, and configure.
● Vaults can be set with access policies for additional security by the users.
● Amazon S3 Glacier jobs are the select queries that execute to retrieve archived data.
● It uses Amazon SNS to notify when the jobs complete.
● It uses ‘S3 Glacier Select’ to query specific archive objects or bytes for analytics instead of complete archives.
● S3 Glacier Select operates on uncompressed comma-separated values
(CSV format) and output results to Amazon S3.
● Amazon S3 Glacier Select uses SQL queries using SELECT, FROM, and WHERE.
● It offers only SSE-KMS and SSE-S3 encryption.
● Amazon S3 Glacier does not provide real-time data retrieval of the archives.
Use Cases:
● It helps to store and archive media data that can increase up to the petabyte level.
● Organizations that generate, analyze, and archive large data can make use of Amazon S3 Glacier and S3 Glacier Deep Archive storage classes.
● Amazon S3 Glacier replaces tape libraries for storage because it does not require high upfront cost and maintenance.
Price details:
● Free Usage Tier - Users can retrieve with standard retrieval up to 10 GB of archive data per month for free.
● Data transfer out from S3 Glacier in the same region is free.