AWS Knowledge
Mastering Cloud Storage with S3 Intelligent-Tiering
Stuart Lundberg
Sep 14, 2024
Today, effective data management is a lifeline for business success. Amazon S3 has changed all that, allowing businesses to store, access, and manage their data affordably and in a cost-effective manner, by leveraging the variety of storage classes and, more importantly, its innovative feature: Intelligent Tiering. In this blog, we'll explore the benefits of Amazon S3 Storage classes, and how Intelligent Tiering can best be optimized for storage cost reduction.
Understanding Amazon S3 Storage Classes
Amazon S3 is Amazon Simple Storage Service-a scalable, object-based, highly-durable storage service that can be used for the purposes of data lakes, backups, mobile applications, and big data analytics. It provides a very reliable storage solution to cater for an individual's needs-in data lakes, for backup or analytics. What makes Amazon S3 unique is that it comes with multiple storage classes, each designed to find the best balance between your access patterns and cost.
With Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering, you receive just one type of cloud storage class that automatically delivers cost savings as access to data changes without affecting performance or adding operational overhead. It thus optimizes the cost because it automatically moves the data to the most economic access tier in the event of changes in the access pattern. For a minimal monthly fee for object monitoring and automation, S3 Intelligent-Tiering tracks access patterns and automatically moves unused objects to cheaper tiers. Since the service launched in 2018, its customers have saved nearly $2 billion of money by choosing to put their data on S3 Intelligent-Tiering instead of S3 Standard.
S3 Intelligent-Tiering is designed ideally for unpredictable data with changing access patterns, regardless of object size or retention duration. It can be a default storage class for nearly any workload - especially for data lakes, analytics, new applications, and user-generated content.
Amazon S3 Standard Storage
Amazon S3 Standard is the default storage class. With a good balance between performance, cost, and availability, it is a perfect choice for high availability scenarios.
Amazon S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (IA)
For data that is accessed less often and yet needs to be readily available, Amazon S3 Standard-IA is ideal. It delivers the same durability and latency characteristics as the Amazon S3 Standard class but at lower prices—lower than Amazon S3 Standard—because data is currently stored in only one Availability Zone.
Amazon S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access (One Zone-IA)
Amazon S3 One Zone-IA is targeted specifically at data that infrequently is accessed quickly, but does not require multiple availability zones, therefore offering a more cost-effective solution. It will be 20% cheaper than S3 Standard-IA; ideal for secondary backups or easily recreatable data. It has the same throughput and low latency like S3 Standard, but it is stored in a single availability zone, so it has the risk of data loss. Its storage classes are managed at the object level quite easily and switching objects between classes is done with ease using S3 Lifecycle policies.
Amazon S3 Glacier and Glacier Deep Archive
Amazon S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval is the least expensive accessible storage for infrequently accessed long-term data. It retrieves data in milliseconds. Up to 68 percent savings on storage compared to the S3 Standard-IA when accessing data quarterly. Archive data, such as medical images or media assets, can be instantaneously accessed. It also provides 99.9 percent availability and effective lifecycle management for interrupted storage and retrieval of data. For more information, refer to the Amazon S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval page.
Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering
Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering storage class is designed to optimize costs automatically when access patterns change between two access tiers. With this feature, you can save storage fees while ensuring no performance trade-offs in the case that your data has unpredictable access patterns.
What is Intelligent-Tiering?
With Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering, you get the automatic moving of data to the most cost-effective access tiers, with changing access patterns. For a small monthly fee, it monitors access and shifts unused objects to lower-cost tiers, so you gain automatic savings across three high-throughput tiers. Activate automatic archiving for data that is asynchronously accessed. Such retrieval fees do not exist, and if an object from the Infrequent or Archive tier starts getting accessed, it gets moved to the Frequent Access tier without incurring any extra retrieval fee.
How Intelligent-Tiering Works
Storage class Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering automatically moves your data to the most cost-effective access tier based on usage patterns. This storage class offers three access tiers:
Frequent Access Tier: Data that are frequently accessed
Infrequent Access Tier: The data is not accessed in the last 30 days, offering savings of 40%
Archive Instant Access Tier: Data not accessed in the last 90 days, with savings of 68%.
Even more savings can be achieved by enabling Deep Archive Access, and data that isn't accessed for 180 days can save up to 95%.
There are no retrieval fees. Again, there is no minimum object size for items, but those below 128 KB are charged as Frequent Access with no monitoring fees. Check the Amazon S3 Pricing page and the S3 Intelligent-Tiering user guide for additional information.
Benefits of Intelligent-Tiering
This primarily allows for dynamic optimization of storage costs, ensuring that there is no need for manual intervention to be sure that your data will always be stored in the most cost-effective tier. This is very useful for data with unpredictable access patterns and is bound to result in huge cost savings.
Cost Savings with Intelligent-Tiering
The most significant cost-saving benefit of Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering is made possible through the automation of the frequent data transfer movement between different storage tiers. A business will functionally be enabled to reduce storage costs without experiencing performance effects by allowing the radio of performance to be pinpointed to the immediate storage requirements of a dataset.
Real-World Cost Reduction
Electronic Arts (EA): By making minimal to no changes to our existing tools, we achieved a 30% reduction in storage costs using S3 Intelligent-Tiering for data with unpredictable access patterns. This has enabled our data infrastructure team to focus on our core competencies related to game launches. Our partnership with AWS allows us to concentrate even more on delighting our customers and inspiring the world to play.
Pricing Model
The pricing model for Intelligent Tiering is very simple. Other than the usual storage prices for the respective tiers, a small monthly monitoring and automation fee per object will be charged. This model will ensure you pay only for what you use, hence becoming very transparent and cost-effective while storing your data.
Automatic Optimization: Data is continuously monitored for movement to the most cost-effective tier for minimal storage costs. This type of automation ensures that you pay only for what you need.
No Retrieval Fees: There are no retrieval fees with Intelligent Tiering; you can retrieve data without added costs.
Use Cases for Intelligent-Tiering
Intelligent-Tiering applies to a few use cases across industries. Following are some scenarios where this might be particularly useful:
Media and Entertainment
The media and entertainment industries have many huge video files and digital assets that need to be archived but must be readily available for editing or distribution. Intelligent-Tiering will ensure these files are stored cost-effectively while remaining easily accessible when required.
Healthcare
Healthcare organizations have huge amounts of patient data, medical records, and imaging files. Intelligent-Tiering efficiently manages these data sets, reducing costs while ensuring quick access to essential information.
Financial Services
The financial sector is characterized by huge chunks of transactional and historical data processing. Intelligent-Tiering offers a cost-effective solution in storing these records, maintaining regulatory compliance while keeping storage expenses at low levels.
E-commerce:
Manage product images and customer data with variable access patterns. Intelligent-Tiering can optimize storage costs while ensuring that important data is readily available.
The secret to minimizing costs of storage lies in being familiar with the life cycle of your data. IntelligentTiering works best in scenarios with uncertain access patterns, letting businesses remain focused on their core operations rather than handling storage needs, which Amazon Web Services will manage.
Setting Up Intelligent-Tiering
Setting up Intelligent-Tiering in Aws S3 is not a challenge at all. The following steps will get you started:
Step 1: Create an S3 Bucket
Log into the Amazon S3 console and then create a new S3 bucket. Make sure to choose the correct AWS region for storing your data.
Step 2: Enable Intelligent-Tiering
Once your bucket is created, turn on Intelligent Tiering as a default storage class. You can do this during bucket creation or later on, through the edit bucket settings.
Step 3: Upload Data
Now, upload your data into the S3 bucket. By default, all new objects will get stored in the Frequent Access Tier of Intelligent Tiering.
Step 4: Monitor and Adjust
You can use the Amazon S3 management console to track your data access patterns. The Intelligent Tiering feature will automatically transfer data across tiers in accordance with these patterns, ensuring long-term optimization of storage costs.
To understand more better, refer to the article about Using the S3 Console to Enable
Monitoring and Controlling Costs
Intelligent Tiering lets you obtain maximum value within a specified budget. Following are some techniques to monitor and control storage costs:
Use AWS Cost Management Tools
AWS provides many cost management tools, such as AWS Cost Explorer and AWS Budgets, that track and analyze your spending on storage. These tools analyze your spending trend, and then you can set budgetary limits accordingly.
Analyze Access Patterns
Schedule regular Amazon S3 analytics for reviewing your data access patterns. Analysis of the frequency of access to your data will enable the adjusting of storage classes as appropriate.
Conduct Regular Audits
Regular auditing of your storage must be done to ensure that data is stored in the most cost-effective tiers. Track any anomalies or unexpected changes in access patterns, and do remediation if necessary.
Integrating Intelligent-Tiering with Other AWS Services
You can integrate Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering with other AWS services to satisfy your more complex requirements for cloud storage. Here are some examples for how you could use such integrations:
AWS Lambda: You could use Intelligent-Tiering in combination with AWS Lambda so as to automate the workflows of data processing. As an example, a specific set of actions, upon the movement of data between tiers of storage, could be triggered by Lambda functions.
AWS Glue: Catalog data using AWS Glue, perform ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) processes. Intelligent-Tiering optimizes the storage of your data, and AWS Glue performs data transformations.
Data Analytics Tools
Combine Intelligent-Tiering with AWS data analytics tools, such as Amazon Athena or Amazon Redshift, for cost-effective analysis of big datasets.
Future Trends in Cloud Storage
The cloud storage space is rapidly evolving, and a number of trends and technologies are fast coming to the fore in shaping its future. Following are the emerging trends one should watch out for.
AI and Machine Learning
AI and machine learning have started to play a crucial role in optimizing cloud storage solutions. The access pattern can easily be guessed through these technologies more accurately. This would further improve the efficiency of the storage classes like Intelligent-Tiering.
Improved Security of Data
Therefore, advanced encryption and access control mechanisms will be integrated into cloud storage solutions in the near future as data security assumes a more significant role. Guarantees on data integrity and compliance will become of paramount importance.
Hybrid Cloud Solutions
Hybrid cloud solutions are becoming very popular. Such solutions combine public and private cloud environments that help give more flexibility and scalability to a business for the optimization of its storage strategy under specific requirements.
Conclusion
Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering supports a strong and cost-efficient solution to handle all your data storage needs. The solution moves data between access tiers automatically by watching usage patterns, thus you get the best of the two worlds in terms of high performance with lower costs. As a startup, small business, or IT professional, intelligent tiering can be critical in enhancing your cloud storage strategy.
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