AWS Cost Saving Tip 13: Use Amazon Glacier for archive data and save costs

Amazon S3 is a storage service that is widely used for storing frequently accessible data like documents, images, videos, log files etc. It is designed for use cases demanding low latency and frequent access. Once the assets grow over a period of time, S3 becomes a costly storage option to the enterprises for rarely accessed items. Such rarely accessed items can be moved to a durable, stable archive systems for saving costs. Some of the use cases for archives are :

• Media assets like news footage, movies, HD content can grow to tens or hundreds of petabytes over years.  Old Archived footage sometimes can become valuable based on current global events and access is needed only during that time.
• Enterprises need to archive data like email, legal records, financial documents etc for complying to their their regulatory and business needs. They are needed only during audits. 
• Organizations like libraries, historical societies, non-profits, governments are increasing their efforts to preserve valuable but aging digital content and artifacts that are no longer readily available. These archive efforts can grow to petabytes over time.

Since Archives do not require frequent access or low latency,for savings costs in Amazon Web Services Infrastructure, you can access real time data from S3 and move rarely retrieved data to Cold storage data archival solutions like Amazon Glacier. 

To explore Log Analysis and Archive with Amazon S3 and Glacier. Refer this detailed article series.

How does it work ?
You can automatically move the objects from S3 to Amazon Glacier using S3 object life cycle rules. Objects which needs to archived to Glacier are configured with object prefixes, relative or absolute time specifier and time periods. Amazon S3 will go through the life cycle policies every day and moves these objects which are qualified to Amazon Glacier. Since the objects are moved from S3 to Glacier, it will be deleted in S3, but the index entry will remain as-is.

What tools can be used ?
You can additionally use the following tools/methodologies to take advantage of this functionality:

• Latest release of CloudBerry Explorer freeware comes with the feature: http://www.cloudberrylab.com/blog/how-to-archive-data-from-amazon-s3-to-glacier-with-cloudberry-explorer/
• Use AWS SDK (Java/.Net based) to access the Amazon Glacier.
• Use Fast Glacier is free for personal use while a commercial licence is also available.  http://fastglacier.com/

Cost Savings ?

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Other Tips

Cost Saving Tip 1: Amazon SQS Long Polling and Batch requests
Cost Saving Tip 2: How right search technology choice saves cost in AWS ?
Cost Saving Tip 3: Using Amazon CloudFront Price Class to minimize costs
Cost Saving Tip 4 : Right Sizing Amazon ElastiCache Cluster
Cost Saving Tip 5: How Amazon Auto Scaling can save costs ?
Cost Saving Tip 6: Amazon Auto Scaling Termination policy and savings
Cost Saving Tip 7: Use Amazon S3 Object Expiration
Cost Saving Tip 8: Use Amazon S3 Reduced Redundancy Storage  
Cost Saving Tip 9: Have efficient EBS Snapshots Retention strategy in place 
Cost Saving Tip 10: Make right choice between PIOPS vs Std EBS volumes and save costs 
Cost Saving Tip 11: How elastic thinking saves cost in Amazon EMR Clusters ? 
Cost Saving Tip 12: Add Spot Instances with Amazon EMR 
Cost Saving Tip 13: Use Amazon Glacier for archive data and save costs (new)
Cost Saving Tip 14: Plan your deletion in Amazon Glacier and avoid cost leakage (new)

Cost Saving Tip 15: Plan your Amazon Glacier Retrieval strategy and avoid cost leakage (new)