Amazon offers a variety of Simple storage service(S3): S3 Standard, S3 Intelligent Tiering, S3 Standard Infrequent Access(IA), S3 One Zone-IA, S3 Glacier, and S3 Glacier Deep Archive.
Choose S3 offerings based on how quickly the data has to be retrieved and how durably it needs to be stored. You can increase savings if high durability and fast retrieval is NOT required. S3 services can be enabled in a granular way up to the object level. For example, a given bucket can have one object as S3 Standard, another using S3 Intelligent Tiering
S3 Standard: Choose this if you require highest performant, high availability & durability for data. Suitable for hosting websites with dynamic content, content distribution, data analytics and processing. Low latency and high throughput. Costliest of all offerings
S3 Intelligent Tiering: most cost effective way to store data without impacting operations or performance. Has 2 Tiers: one optimized for storing frequent access and another, low cost tier optimized for storing infrequent access. Good solution when data has to be stored for a long time and when we are not certain of how often this object will be accessed. If an object has not been accessed for last 30 days, it’ll be moved to infrequent access(IA) tier. If an object in IA tier is retrieved, it is again transferred to the frequent access tier. Transfer of objects between tiers are not charged
Below offerings will be helpful when you are going to store for at least 30 days and not going to access very often. Each offering differs on how quick the content you requested has to be retrieved
S3 Standard Infrequent Access(IA): Choose this when you want retrieval to happen right away and expecting highest level of availability. Objects are stored in multiple zones for making highly available
S3 One Zone — IA: Same as S3 Standard IA except that as name suggests, objects are stored in only 1 zone. So, when that specific zone is down or is destroyed, these files will be unavailable and potentially destroyed as well. So, it should only be used with files that are not mission-critical.
S3 Glacier: Low cost offering. When you are not expecting retrieval to happen right away and you can wait upto 3–5 hours, you can choose this offering.
S3 Glacier Deep Archive: Cheapest of all offerings. Data retrieval takes longer than a day. When you want files to be stored for many years(mainly due to regulatory compliance) but will be accessed only occasionally
