What Is S3 Intelligent Tiering?

What Is S3 Intelligent Tiering
Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering Storage Class | AWS Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering is the only cloud storage class that delivers automatic storage cost savings when data access patterns change, without performance impact or operational overhead. The Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering storage class is designed to optimize storage costs by automatically moving data to the most cost-effective access tier when access patterns change.

For a small monthly object monitoring and automation charge, S3 Intelligent-Tiering monitors access patterns and automatically moves objects that have not been accessed to lower-cost access tiers. Since the launch of S3 Intelligent-Tiering in 2018, customers have saved $1 billion from adopting S3 Intelligent-Tiering when compared to S3 Standard.

S3 Intelligent-Tiering is the ideal storage class for data with unknown, changing, or unpredictable access patterns, independent of object size or retention period. You can use S3 Intelligent-Tiering as the default storage class for virtually any workload, especially data lakes, data analytics, new applications, and user-generated content.

Overview: Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering (5:51) Better, faster, and lower-cost storage: Optimizing Amazon S3 (48:20) The Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering storage class is designed to optimize storage costs by automatically moving data to the most cost-effective access tier when access patterns change. For a small monthly object monitoring and automation charge, S3 Intelligent-Tiering monitors access patterns and automatically moves objects that have not been accessed to lower-cost access tiers.

S3 Intelligent-Tiering delivers automatic storage cost savings in three low-latency and high-throughput access tiers. For data that can be accessed asynchronously, you can choose to activate automatic archiving capabilities within the S3 Intelligent-Tiering storage class.

Frequent, Infrequent, and Archive Instant Access tiers have the same low-latency and high-throughput performance of S3 Standard The Infrequent Access tier saves up to 40% on storage costs The Archive Instant Access tier saves up to 68% on storage costs Opt-in asynchronous archive capabilities for objects that become rarely accessed Archive Access and Deep Archive Access tiers have the same performance as S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval and S3 Glacier Deep Archive and save up to 95% for rarely accessed objects Designed for durability of 99.999999999% of objects across multiple Availability Zones and for 99.9% availability over a given year No operational overhead, no lifecycle charges, no retrieval charges, and no minimum storage duration

Opt-in asynchronous Deep Archive Access tier Both opt-in asynchronous Archive Access tiers

For a small monthly object monitoring and automation charge, S3 Intelligent-Tiering moves objects that have not been accessed for 30 consecutive days to the Infrequent Access tier for savings of 40%; and after 90 days of no access, they’re moved to the Archive Instant Access tier with savings of 68%.

To save more on data that doesn’t require immediate retrieval, you can activate the optional asynchronous Deep Archive Access tier. When turned on, objects not accessed for 180 days are moved to the Deep Archive Access tier with up to 95% in storage cost savings.

If the objects are accessed later, S3 Intelligent-Tiering moves the objects back to the Frequent Access tier.
If the object you are retrieving is stored in the optional Deep Archive tier, before you can retrieve the object you must first restore a copy using RestoreObject.
For information about restoring archived objects, see,

There are no retrieval charges in S3 Intelligent-Tiering. S3 Intelligent-Tiering has no minimum eligible object size, but objects smaller than 128 KB are not eligible for auto tiering. These smaller objects may be stored, but they’ll always be charged at the Frequent Access tier rates and don’t incur the monitoring and automation charge. What Is S3 Intelligent Tiering Both opt-in asynchronous Archive Access tiers The Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering storage class is designed to optimize storage costs by automatically moving data to the most cost-effective access tier when access patterns change. S3 Intelligent-Tiering automatically stores objects in three access tiers: one tier optimized for frequent access, a lower-cost tier optimized for infrequent access, and a very-low-cost tier optimized for rarely accessed data.

To save more on data that doesn’t require immediate retrieval, you can activate the optional asynchronous Archive Access and Deep Archive Access tiers. When turned on, objects not accessed for 90 days are moved directly to the Archive Access Tier (bypassing the automatic Archive Instant Access tier) for savings of 71%, and the Archive Deep Archive Access tier after 180 days with up to 95% in storage cost savings.

If the objects are accessed later, S3 Intelligent-Tiering moves the objects back to the Frequent Access tier.
If the object you are retrieving is stored in the optional Archive Access or Deep Archive tiers, before you can retrieve the object you must first restore a copy using RestoreObject.
For information about restoring archived objects, see,

Shutterstock, founded in 2003, is a leading global creative platform for transformative brands and media companies. Working with a community of over 2 million contributors, the Shutterstock catalog has grown to more than 405 million images and over 25 million videos.

The savings we realized from using S3 Intelligent-Tiering, up to 60% in some buckets, allowed us to further reinvest in our storage infrastructure and replicate our storage environment to a second AWS Region. In a short time span, we experienced multiple major improvements, which increased performance and reduced the cost of Amazon S3.

This did not require a major invasive refresh on our side as it would have if we had stayed on premises. Our increased access utilization of our buckets is being outpaced by performance improvements on S3 as well, due to S3’s continuous innovation. To our delight, many of our recent acquisitions use Amazon S3 as well, making for optimal integration with existing architectures and leading to some productive business transformation conversations with our new colleagues. Stripe is a technology company that builds economic infrastructure for the internet. Businesses of every size—from new startups to public companies—use Stripe software to accept payments and manage their businesses online. “Since the launch of S3 Intelligent-Tiering in 2018, we’ve automatically saved ~30% per month on our storage costs without any impact on performance or need to analyze our data. Capital One has been a disrupter in the financial services industry since 1994, using technology to transform banking and payments. Today, the “digital bank” is all in on AWS, embracing storage, data analytics, microservices, AI/ML, and other solutions to continue to innovate.

We wanted to find a way to quickly optimize storage costs across the largest and fastest growing buckets across the enterprise. Because the storage usage patterns vary widely across our top buckets, there was no clear-cut rule we could safely apply without taking on some operational overhead. The S3 Intelligent-Tiering storage class delivered automatic storage savings based on the changing access patterns of our data without impact on performance.

We look forward to S3 Intelligent-Tiering’s new Archive Instant access tier which will allow us to realize even greater savings without additional effort.” Jerzy Grzywinski, Director of Software Engineering – Capital One Mobileye is leading the mobility revolution with its autonomous-driving and driver-assist technologies, harnessing world-renowned expertise in computer vision, machine learning, mapping, and data analysis. “We use Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering because access patterns are often unpredictable. Epic Games is the interactive entertainment company behind Fortnite, one of the world’s most popular video games with over 400 million players. Founded in 1991, Epic transformed gaming with the release of Unreal Engine—the 3D creation engine powering hundreds of games now used across industries, such as automotive, film and television, and simulation, for real-time production.

“Using S3 Intelligent-Tiering, we can implement storage changes without interruptions to service and activity. Our data is automatically moved to lower-cost tiers based on data access, saving us a lot of development time in addition to reducing costs. With that time, my team can focus on identifying other opportunities to reduce infrastructure costs in support of our organizational goals.

The new Archive Instant Access tier in S3 Intelligent-Tiering will help us save even more on storage costs.” Joshua Bergen, Cost Management Lead – Epic Games CineSend is a leading provider of cloud-based media asset management tools for the film and television industry. CineSend offers a portfolio of out-of-the-box and custom software solutions for studios, independent producers, and film distributors to manage premium media content delivery workflows.

“Using S3 Intelligent-Tiering allowed us to use a ‘set-it-and-forget-it’ model for stored media content. Confident that frequently and infrequently accessed files are in their correct storage class and that costs are being kept to an efficient minimum, my team is able to focus on our mandate: deliver secure video content across the globe with cutting-edge technology.” D’Arcy Rail-Ip, VP Technology – CineSend Electronic Arts (EA) is a global leader in digital interactive entertainment.

EA makes games that touch 450+ million players across console, PC, and mobile including top franchises such as FIFA, Madden, and Battlefield. EA has transformed from a Hadoop dominant environment to one centered around an AWS Cloud Storage based data lake on Amazon S3, including S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval for data archiving and long-term backup.

To support our top games, our core telemetry systems routinely deal with 10s of petabytes, 10s of thousands of tables, and 2+ billion objects. EA used S3 Intelligent-Tiering to optimize storage costs for their data lake with changing access patterns. “With minimal to no changes to our existing tools, we were able to reduce storage costs by 30% with S3 Intelligent-Tiering for data with unpredictable access patterns.

This has helped our data infrastructure team concentrate on our core competencies related to game launches. Our collaboration with AWS allows us the ability to focus even more on growing and delighting our customers to continue inspiring the world to play.

Sundeep Narravula, Principal Technical Director – EA Torc Robotics, a global leader and pioneer in trucking, offers a complete self-driving vehicle software and integration solution and is currently focusing on commercializing self-driving trucks. With Torc Robotics’s rapid growth, its S3 storage quickly grew to petabytes of data in S3 buckets that its vehicle data acquisition team was looking to optimize.

Torc Robotics’ use of S3 Intelligent-Tiering is realizing automatic storage cost savings of 24% per month without impacting application performance or adding development work. “We prioritized optimizing our Amazon S3 usage to support future growth. However, all of the buckets were a black box and we needed to find a safe solution we could push across all of Torc Robotics without impacting performance.

S3 Intelligent-Tiering was our ‘easy’ button and helped us move at the speed we needed without adding development cycles.” Justin Brown, Head of Vehicle Data Acquisition – Torc Robotics German live streaming service Joyn GmbH, a ProSiebenSat.1 and Discovery joint venture, is tapping into its deep content vault to bring subscribers exclusive, hyperlocal series, and films from the past for enjoyment.

To make this possible, Joyn recently transferred over 3 petabytes (PB) of media archives from an on-premises facility in into Amazon S3 in under three months using 40 AWS Snowball appliances. By utilizing Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering, Joyn can keep all of its content online and also optimize storage automatically as access patterns change – without an impact on performance or operational overhead.

Content from the archive that sees a lot of interest is sorted into a frequent access tier, while content that draws less attention is stored in an infrequent access tier.
It used to be that we’d have to be selective about which content we’d retrieve from our deep archive, or in some cases, what we’d keep on the archive, but now it’s a no brainer.

We were able to grow our storage volume by a factor of 3x for the same total cost of ownership (TCO) by using S3 Intelligent-Tiering. It’s great to no longer have to think about deleting content to make space, and if inactive, the content sits in an infrequent access or archive tier.” Stefan Haufe, Media Engineer – Joyn Amazon Photos provides unlimited photo storage and 5 GB of video storage to Amazon Prime members in eight marketplaces world-wide.

Customers backup, relive, and share memories on Amazon Photos’ mobile, web, and desktop apps, and relive these memories on Amazon smart screen devices like Amazon Echo Show and Amazon Fire TV. “Since the launch of Amazon Photos, we have been using Amazon S3. While S3 Standard storage was able to grow with the scale of our business, the need to optimize for cost and performance of a large (and growing) volume of data presented challenges.

With the launch of S3 Intelligent-Tiering in 2018, and the recent addition of the S3 Intelligent-Tiering Archive Instant Access tier, the Amazon Photos team was able to instantly use an AWS solution with minimal to no changes to our existing services, and in the process save over 10% in storage costs.” Arun Kumar Agarwal, Software Development Manager – Amazon Photos Stacie Buckingham, Senior Software Development Manager – Amazon Photos Founded in 2008, Zalando is Europe’s leading online platform for fashion and lifestyle with over 32 million active customers.

Amazon S3 is the cornerstone of the data infrastructure of Zalando, and they have utilized S3 Storage Classes to optimize storage costs.
We are saving 37% annually in storage costs by using Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering to automatically move objects that have not been touched within 30 days to the infrequent-access tier.” Max Schultze, Lead Data Engineer – Zalando Teespring, an online platform that lets creators turn unique ideas into custom merchandise, experienced rapid business growth, and the company’s data also grew exponentially—to a petabyte—and continued to increase.

Like many cloud native companies, Teespring addressed the problem by using AWS, specifically storing data on Amazon S3. By using S3 Intelligent-Tiering, Teespring now saves more than 30 percent on its monthly storage costs. AppsFlyer is a leading mobile advertising attribution and marketing analytics platform.

AppsFlyer stores data from its 100 billion events per day in a petabyte scale data lake on Amazon S3.
But had little insight when it came to whether objects older than 365 days would be accessed frequently again in the future, and thereby incur unexpected retrieval charges.
AppsFlyer needed a different solution and found it in S3 Intelligent-Tiering.

AppsFlyer was able to take an informed decision to transition data to S3 Intelligent-Tiering that yielded a cost reduction of 18% per GB stored. Reducing cost is important for AppsFlyer as it helps increase revenue and allows AppsFlyer to invest in new workloads.

“S3 Intelligent-Tiering allows us to make better use and be more cost efficient whenever we have to go to historical data and make changes on top of it.” Reshef Mann, CTO and Co-Founder – AppsFlyer Embark is building self-driving truck technology to make roads safer and improve the efficiency of transportation.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Embark made a decision to pause their truck operations in order to align with social responsibility to public health and ensure the safety of their workforce. Embark turned to their petabytes of historical data on Amazon S3 and develop systems to allow them to leverage these more deeply.

Engineers began pulling from years of historical data, pouring through thousands of hours of driving data to find scenarios of interest, and usied this data to build stronger simulations against which they could test their system. With all of Embark’s data stored using the S3 Intelligent-Tiering storage class, Embark didn’t have to spend time thinking about which data should be available and how to move this data between different storage tiers in order to optimize costs while still enabling this sudden pattern of random data access into their data lake.

S3 Intelligent-Tiering did all of the work of optimizing costs for them so that their team could focus all of their engineering efforts on building better data pipelines and simulation systems. With the help of AWS, Embark’s team was able to quickly adapt to the challenges of the pandemic and when the pause was lifted, they were able to continue their focus on delivering the safety and efficiency benefits of self-driving trucks.

Optimizing storage costs using Amazon S3 (32:31) Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering overview (3:40) Demo: Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering (3:06) Best practices for cost optimization with Amazon S3 (47:23) Many customers of all sizes and industries tell us they are growing at an unprecedented scale – both their business and their data.

This post helps you understand how to control your storage costs for workloads that have predictable and changing access patterns, and how to take action to implement changes to realize storage costs savings. If you have an increasing number of S3 buckets, spread across tens or hundreds of accounts, you might be in search of a tool that makes it easier to manage your growing storage footprint and improve cost efficiencies.

This post will help you walk away with a basic understanding of how to use S3 Storage Lens to identify typical cost savings opportunities, and how to take action to implement changes to realize those cost savings.
We launched S3 Intelligent-Tiering in 2018, which added the capability to take advantage of S3 without needing to have a deep understanding of your data access patterns.

In 2020, we launched opt-in archiving capabilities that will archive objects that are rarely accessed. These new optimizations will reduce the amount of manual work you need to do to archive objects with unpredictable access patterns and that are not accessed for months at a time.

To save up to 95% on storage costs for data that is not accessed for months, or even years, at a time, customers are increasingly using the optional asynchronous Archive Access and Deep Archive Access tiers within the S3 Intelligent-Tiering storage class. At the same time, customers want a solution to automate data restores when they query objects that are not immediately accessible in the S3 Intelligent-Tiering Archive Access and Deep Archive Access tiers.

In this blog post, we share a solution to automate data restores in response to a GET call whenever the objects are not immediately accessible in the optional Archive and Deep Archive Access tiers. The vast majority of data customers store on Amazon S3 has unknown or changing access patterns, such as data lakes, analytics, and new applications.

With these use cases, a dataset can become infrequently and even rarely accessed at specific points in time.
The problem is that customers don’t know how data access patterns will change in the future.
In this blog post, we provide you with an easy-to-use mechanism to automate the creation of S3 Lifecycle rules at scale for all the buckets in your account to automatically transition your objects from S3 Standard to the S3 Intelligent-Tiering storage class.

You can configure S3 Intelligent-Tiering as the default storage class for newly created data by specifying INTELLIGENT-TIERING on your, S3 Intelligent-Tiering is designed for 99.9% availability and 99.999999999% durability, and automatically offers the same low-latency and high-throughput performance of S3 Standard.

To learn more, visit the,
The consists of AWS services, best practices, and tools to help customers save costs and accelerate migrations of storage workloads to AWS.
Reach your migration goals even faster with AWS services, best practices, tools, and incentives.
Workloads that are well suited for storage migration include on premises data lakes, large unstructured data repositories, file shares, home directories, backups, and archives.

AWS offers more ways to help you reduce storage costs, and more options to migrate your data. That is why more customers choose AWS storage to build the foundation for their cloud IT environment. : Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering Storage Class | AWS

When not to use S3 intelligent tiering?

When Shouldn’t I Use S3 Intelligent-Tiering? – S3 Intelligent-Tiering can save a nice amount on your AWS bill if it fits your use cases. However, it’s not right for all situations. Below are a few situations where S3 Intelligent-Tiering may not be for you.

Predictable access patterns: If your objects have very predictable access patterns, you could handle them via object lifecycle rules rather than S3 Intelligent-Tiering. By doing this, you would avoid the monitoring charge of $0.0025 per 1,000 objects. Very small objects: If your objects are smaller than 128KB, they will never be moved from the frequent access tier to the infrequent access tier. Short-lived objects: S3 Intelligent-Tiering has a minimum storage duration charge of 30 days. If your objects are deleted before that time, you should use a different storage class.

In the next section, we’ll do some cost comparisons across the S3 storage classes.

What is the difference between lifecycle policies and intelligent tiering?

This article is about the differences between the two options available for storing your content in AWS Simple Storage Service (S3). Well to understand this lets first dig in and have a look at what Amazon S3 is and what different features does it have.

Amazon S3 or Simple Storage Service is a secure, durable, and highly scalable object storage built to store and retrieve any amount of data and has a simple web services interface that you can use to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web.
Some common use cases for using S3 are to store and distribute static web content and media, store data for analytics, and for backup and data archival.

It stores these objects in something called a “Bucket”. S3 has some great features which include; 1. Tired Storage Available 2. Lifecycle Management 3. Versioning 4. Encryption 5. MFA Delete 6. Secure data using ACLs and Bucket Policies S3 offers the following storage classes/tiers to fit various needs and use cases:

Standard (S3-Standard), for general purpose storage of data that is frequently accessed Standard-Infrequent Access (S3-IA), for data that is accessed less frequently One-Zone IA, for non-critical data that is infrequently accessed Glacier, for archival data that does not need to be accessed immediately Glacier Deep Archive, for archival data that is accessed rarely if ever Intelligent Tiering, for data with varying or unknown access needs

In this article however, we will only be focusing on the Intelligent Tiering and Lifecycle Management, So, what is Intelligent Tiering? Well, as the name suggests this storage class uses Intelligence for storing data. It uses machine learning to determine the access patterns for your data and then accordingly places the most frequently accessed data in the best storage class available (i.e., S3-Standard ) and the infrequently accessed data in the S3 Standard-Infrequent Access(IA) storage class.

One thing to note, however, is that Intelligent Tiering only supports S3 Standard and S3 Standard-IA at this time and hence won’t be able to move objects beyond S3 Standard-IA i.e., to a much cheaper storage solution like S3-Glacier.
If any object placed in S3 Intelligent Tiering isn’t accessed for 30 consecutive days, it is automatically moved to Infrequent Access storage and if an object in Intelligent Tiering is accessed, it will be returned to frequent access (i.e., S3 Standard).

This enables you to automatically resize cost savings from moving objects to Standard-IA in a way that suits your needs rather than moving objects blindly. This makes Amazon S3 Intelligent Tiering a great option for storage of objects with unpredictable access needs.

Intelligent Tiering has no additional charges for moving objects between frequent and infrequent access tiers. However, it does charge you for monitoring the objects. What is Lifecycle Management? Lifecycle management or Object lifecycle management is a set of rules or policies defined by you to move and/or delete object/s according to your desired timeline.

The main thing to note here is that the life cycle management supports all the S3 Storage classes, unlike the Intelligent Tiering which only supports Standard and Standard-IA. Now, imagine this. You have objects which need to be accessed multiple times for a few weeks and then never accessed again, such as logs.

You can’t delete them either because you are bound by some compliance rules that dictate all logs are retained, but keeping them in S3 standard won’t be a cost-effective solution.
You can apply life cycle management policies on such object and move them straight to S3-Glacier Deep Archive.
In lifecycle management, you can choose to monitor the data access patterns using S3 Storage Class Analysis which costs $0.10 per million objects monitored per month.

A lifecycle management policy can be applied to an entire bucket, a group of objects(filtered by prefix or tag), or to a single object. So, by now you would be wondering which one to use then? Well, just keep in mind that whenever your objects have a defined lifecycle, such as needing access for a month and then never needing to be accessed again, a lifecycle policy is the most efficient and cost-effective solution for you because you can straight away archive them to Glacier deep drive storage. Also note that S3 Intelligent Tiering supports Lifecycle policies, so you could even configure rules to keep objects in Intelligent Tiering for a few months, and then move them straight to S3-Glacier.

What is S3 intelligent tiering migration?

2. Archive + Deep Archive Access tier – If you activate the Archive Access tier, S3 Intelligent-Tiering will stop using the Archive Instant Access tier and automatically move objects that have not been accessed for 90 days to the Archive Access tier. What Is S3 Intelligent Tiering

Is intelligent tiering more expensive than standard?

Standard vs Intelligent Cost Comparison – Lets put together a quick hypothetical example to demonstrate the cost difference between these two beasts. Below are the conditions for the comparison: Conditions

100GB of Data Storage1000 GET / PUT Requests per monthFor intelligent tier, 50% of data in frequent tier/high tier, 50% of data in infrequent tierFor intelligent tier, 5000 objects being monitored0 data transfer out of AWS

With these conditions, the grand total when using Standard Tier comes to $2.31 USD per month. For Intelligent Tier, this comes out to $1.79 USD per month. That’s a cost savings of nearly 25% by going with intelligent over standard. To run your own cost experiments, you can use the S3 pricing calculator here,

What is the disadvantage of storage tiering?

Cons of Tiered Storage – Because data classed as “cold” or seldom accessed generally ends up on low-cost storage devices/services with significant latency, adopting tiered storage has a performance penalty. Queries on limited-cost storage take a long time to complete.

The internet’s bandwidth and cloud storage’s maximum ingest rates may be slower.
Communication delay increases as well.
The lengthier, more time-consuming complete backups may generally run in the background without causing any issues.
More extended backup periods may harm specialized programs like databases (like Microsoft SQL Server and Exchange).

Whole-server restoration may take longer. The key takeaway is to satisfy your contractual recovery time targets (RTOs). If you can’t restore everything in time, try running hybrid backups on those essential servers and storing them both locally and in the cloud.

If you do backups during business hours or peak internet use, your internet speed may suffer.
Set up bandwidth use constraints in your backup software (or limit through other network-controlled techniques) to avoid saturating your internet connection when other vital business activities need internet access.

Tiered storage, especially automated ones, saves time in the long term. However, the first step is to develop standards for categorizing data depending on its value, which may be a lengthy process. The difficulty of categorizing data for tiered solutions might have undesirable consequences, such as data being stored on the incorrect storage medium and inefficient operations.

Does intelligent tiering support versioning?

Disadvantages of AWS S3 Intelligent Tiering –

If access patterns are predictable, then lifecycle rules may be more cost-effective than Intelligent Tiering;
It is not straightforward to identify objects that have been in the archive tiers for a long time so that these can be transitioned to Glacier and Glacier Deep Archive storage classes to avoid the S3 Intelligent Tiering monitoring fees;
It is limited only to the S3, infrequent and archive tiers whereas some users may need to move data across EFS, FSX, S3 and Glacier storage classes for maximum efficiency;
Policies to tier to archive tiers cannot be greater than two years;
Objects smaller than 128KB are never moved from the frequent access tier;
You cannot configure different policies for different groups or custom data sets, as it is an automated management solution that applies to entire buckets, prefixes or tagged data sets.
Data tiering configurations need to be managed and configured for each bucket level instead of an account or global level for multiple buckets;
You cannot set different versioning and backup policies for different tiers of S3 Intelligent Tiering; the policy applies to the entire bucket.

Do S3 regions matter?

Amazon S3 Buckets – You can create up to 100 buckets in each of your AWS cloud accounts, with no limit on the number of objects you can store in a bucket. If needed, you can request up to 1,000 more buckets by submitting a service limit increase. When you create a bucket, you have the ability to choose the AWS region to store it in.

To minimize costs and address latency concerns, it’s best practice to select a region that’s geographically closest to you. Objects that reside in a bucket within a specific region remain in that region unless you transfer the files elsewhere. It’s also important to know that Amazon S3 buckets are globally unique.

No other AWS account in the same region can have the same bucket names as yours unless you first delete your own buckets.

Does S3 replicate data across regions?

Overview – Amazon S3 Replication is an elastic, fully managed, low-cost feature that replicates objects between Amazon S3 buckets. S3 Replication gives you the ability to replicate data from one source bucket to multiple destination buckets in the same, or different, AWS Regions.

Whether you want to maintain a secondary copy of your data for data protection, or have data in multiple geographies to provide users with the lowest latency, S3 Replication gives you the controls you need to meet your business needs.
This Amazon S3 getting started guide shows you how to follow S3 Replication best practices with S3 Same-Region Replication (SRR), S3 Cross-Region Replication (CRR), S3 Replication Time Control (S3 RTC), and S3 Batch Replication.

With S3 Same-Region Replication (SRR), you can automatically replicate data between buckets within the same AWS Region to help aggregate logs into a single bucket, replicate between developer and test accounts, and abide by data sovereignty laws. With S3 Cross-Region Replication (CRR), you can replicate objects (and their respective metadata and object tags) into other AWS Regions for reduced latency, compliance, security, disaster recovery, and regional efficiency.

You can also enable S3 Replication Time Control (S3 RTC) to help you meet compliance or business requirements for data replication.
S3 RTC replicates most objects that you upload to Amazon S3 in seconds, and 99.99 percent of those objects within 15 minutes.
To replicate existing objects, you can use S3 Batch Replication to backfill a newly created bucket with existing objects, retry objects that were previously unable to replicate, migrate data across accounts, or add new buckets to your data lake.

For more information on S3 Replication, visit the Replicating Objects section in the Amazon S3 User Guide. By the end of this tutorial, you will be able to replicate data within and between AWS Regions using Amazon S3 Replication.

What are the 6 R’s AWS migration strategies?

In this article, you will learn:

What is an application migration strategy? Comparison of AWS 6 R’s strategies Understanding AWS 6 R’s How to choose the right AWS migration strategy

If you were looking at migrating your existing applications to the AWS Cloud, you usually come across something called AWS 6 R’s model or 6 R’s of cloud migration. This originates from the “5 R’s” model published by Gartner in 2010, which defined all the basic options to migrate a specific application to the cloud. What Is S3 Intelligent Tiering

What is the minimum file size for S3 intelligent-tiering?

* S3 Intelligent-Tiering charges a small monitoring and automation charge, and has a minimum eligible object size of 128KB for auto-tiering.

What is the difference between S3 one zone IA and standard IA?

S3 Standard-IA costs less than S3 Standard in terms of storage price, while still providing the same high durability, throughput, and low latency of S3 Standard. S3 One Zone-IA has 20% less cost than Standard-IA. It is recommended to use multipart upload for objects larger than 100MB.

What are the two methods of storage tiering?

Cold Storage vs Hot Storage – A basic distinction in tiered storage is between “cold” and “hot” storage. The following table summarizes the differences between cold and hot data.

	Cold	Hot
Required Access Speed	Slow	Fast
Access Frequency	Low	High
Value of Data	Low	High
Storage Media	Slower drives, tape	Faster drives, SSD
Storage Location	May be off-premises	Colocated or fast link to the data consumer
Cost	Low cost	High cost

Which storage tier is the best for storing?

Online access tiers – When your data is stored in an online access tier (either hot or cool), users can access it immediately. The hot tier is the best choice for data that is in active use. The cool tier is ideal for data that is accessed less frequently, but that still must be available for reading and writing. Example usage scenarios for the hot tier include:

Data that’s in active use or data that you expect will require frequent reads and writes. Data that’s staged for processing and eventual migration to the cool access tier.

Usage scenarios for the cool access tier include:

Short-term data backup and disaster recovery. Older data sets that aren’t used frequently, but are expected to be available for immediate access. Large data sets that need to be stored in a cost-effective way while other data is being gathered for processing.

To learn how to move a blob to the hot or cool tier, see Set a blob’s access tier, Data in the cool tier has slightly lower availability, but offers the same high durability, retrieval latency, and throughput characteristics as the hot tier. For data in the cool tier, slightly lower availability and higher access costs may be acceptable trade-offs for lower overall storage costs, as compared to the hot tier.

For more information, see SLA for storage,
A blob in the cool tier in a general-purpose v2 account is subject to an early deletion penalty if it’s deleted or moved to a different tier before 30 days has elapsed.
This charge is prorated.
For example, if a blob is moved to the cool tier and then deleted after 21 days, you’ll be charged an early deletion fee equivalent to 9 (30 minus 21) days of storing that blob in the cool tier.

The hot and cool tiers support all redundancy configurations. For more information about data redundancy options in Azure Storage, see Azure Storage redundancy,

What is the difference between tiered storage and caching?

The key differences between caching and tiering Aron Brand, CTO, CTERA, discusses in detail two different approaches to managing data migration across numerous Edge and cloud locations – caching and tiering. We hear about the benefits of both strategies and how they differ.

As organisations increasingly adopt a hybrid cloud approach, IT administrators must understand how the two technologies differ in order to ensure their chosen data management solutions meet their requirements. Read on for the key differences between caching and tiering:
Copying vs. moving data
Data is transferred between the local, on-premises storage tier and the cloud storage tier with both caching and tiering, but in different ways: caching copies data between tiers, whereas tiering moves it.
Edge-centric vs cloud-centric approach

Tiering is a technique that focuses on the Edge. In this scenario, portions of locally-stored data are migrated, according to pre-established criteria, from the Edge to a slower and cheaper tier, such as the cloud, and retrieved on demand. The cloud is where cold data is archived at a lower cost, with local storage acting as the primary storage.

Let’s look at how caching and tiering stack up against four use cases for hybrid cloud storage, as defined by Gartner in its : burst for capacity, disaster recovery, burst for compute, and data orchestration.
Caching vs. tiering: Burst for capacity

Burst for capacity allows Edge devices to expand their storage capacity indefinitely and elastically, leaking excess data into a low-cost cloud storage tier. Cloud storage is particularly cost-effective for capacity bursting because it is elastic and organisations only pay for the capacity they utilise.

Both tiering and caching are well suited to this use case.
Caching vs.
Tiering: Burst for compute When a dataset is created locally but needs to be accessed in the cloud for processing or analytics, burst for compute is employed.
A visual effects company, for example, may run 1,000 cloud servers for eight hours to render 3D models developed by a team of artists working locally.

Tiering is not appropriate for this use case, as live data processing (i.e. rendering) cannot take place in the cloud. Caching saves both hot and cold data in the cloud, allowing data analysis and processing to make use of the cloud’s high-performance compute capabilities.

Caching vs. tiering: Disaster Recovery Local data is backed up to the cloud for Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity. Caching enables Disaster Recovery capabilities and, more critically, fast recovery by keeping all data in highly robust and redundant cloud storage. In the event of a disaster, a new caching device can be launched anywhere in minutes to provide data access instantly while the cache is warmed up in the background.

Tiering, on the other hand, only stores cold data in the cloud; safeguarding local data is outside the purview of tiering and necessitates the use of a separate backup solution. Caching vs. tiering: Data orchestration In hybrid cloud deployments, data orchestration is utilised to obtain a consolidated view of data across several clouds employing a single protocol or interface.

Consider a company that wishes to display a single view of data that can be read and written from a number of Edge and cloud locations, as well as transport data across them and manage access through a single namespace.
This use case is not supported by tiering because only cold data is managed in the cloud.

Cloud caching, on the other hand, exposes a global multi-cloud file system that consolidates data from several backend storage clouds and Edge locations into a single namespace that can be accessed from anywhere. To sum up, caching and tiering are two different approaches to manage data migration across numerous Edge and cloud locations.

Tiering keeps live data at the Edge, while stale data is moved to the cloud.
In contrast, all data is stored in the cloud and cached at the Edge for quick access via cloud caching.
While tiering can help end-user organisations save money on storage, it is only useful for one hybrid cloud use case, capacity bursting.

Caching is a preferable option for hybrid cloud architectures because it supports a wide range of use cases, including Disaster Recovery, compute bursting and data orchestration, in addition to capacity bursting. : The key differences between caching and tiering

Which data tier has the best performance?

Tier 4 Data Center (Fault tolerant) – Tier 4 data center security marks the highest standard for data centers—usually utilized by businesses that require constant availability, which is most businesses today. They have an uptime of 99.995%, meaning annual downtime of no more than 26 minutes.

They also feature 2N and 2N+1, fully redundant infrastructure—the main difference between Tiers III and IV.2N redundancy means there is a completely mirrored system on standby, independent of the primary system.
This means that should anything happen to a component in the main data center, there is an identical replica for every component ready to pick up the slack.

This is by far the most robust form of security that can be employed. All components are supported by two generators, two UPS systems, and two cooling systems. Each path is independent of each other, meaning that a single failure in one will not cause a domino effect with other components, as is the case with lower tiers.

Tier IV data centers have a power outage protection of 96 hours, and this power must not be connected to any external source and must be independent. This is what’s referred to as “fault tolerance”—a capability which means that in the event of a system failure, IT operations aren’t affected in any way.

Unlike Tier III, Tier IV data centers are prepared for unplanned maintenance—businesses which use Tier IV systems will often be unaware that an outage has taken place at all.

What are the reasons for tiering?

Categorizing suppliers into tiers helps to streamline communications between a business and its suppliers. Supplier tiering also allows businesses to manage its supplier base more efficiently, perform supply chain risk management activities, and get the best possible results from its suppliers.

Under which of the following circumstances might S3 intelligent tiering be an appropriate choice for storage?

Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering Storage Class | AWS Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering is the only cloud storage class that delivers automatic storage cost savings when data access patterns change, without performance impact or operational overhead. The Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering storage class is designed to optimize storage costs by automatically moving data to the most cost-effective access tier when access patterns change.

For a small monthly object monitoring and automation charge, S3 Intelligent-Tiering monitors access patterns and automatically moves objects that have not been accessed to lower-cost access tiers.
Since the launch of S3 Intelligent-Tiering in 2018, customers have saved $1 billion from adopting S3 Intelligent-Tiering when compared to S3 Standard.

Overview: Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering (5:51) Better, faster, and lower-cost storage: Optimizing Amazon S3 (48:20) The Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering storage class is designed to optimize storage costs by automatically moving data to the most cost-effective access tier when access patterns change. For a small monthly object monitoring and automation charge, S3 Intelligent-Tiering monitors access patterns and automatically moves objects that have not been accessed to lower-cost access tiers.

Opt-in asynchronous Deep Archive Access tier Both opt-in asynchronous Archive Access tiers

If the objects are accessed later, S3 Intelligent-Tiering moves the objects back to the Frequent Access tier.
If the object you are retrieving is stored in the optional Deep Archive tier, before you can retrieve the object you must first restore a copy using RestoreObject.
For information about restoring archived objects, see,

For a small monthly object monitoring and automation charge, S3 Intelligent-Tiering moves objects that have not been accessed for 30 consecutive days to the Infrequent Access tier for savings of 40%; and after 90 days of no access, they’re moved to the Archive Instant Access tier with savings of 68%.

If the objects are accessed later, S3 Intelligent-Tiering moves the objects back to the Frequent Access tier. If the object you are retrieving is stored in the optional Archive Access or Deep Archive tiers, before you can retrieve the object you must first restore a copy using RestoreObject. For information about restoring archived objects, see,

The savings we realized from using S3 Intelligent-Tiering, up to 60% in some buckets, allowed us to further reinvest in our storage infrastructure and replicate our storage environment to a second AWS Region.
In a short time span, we experienced multiple major improvements, which increased performance and reduced the cost of Amazon S3.

“We wanted to find a way to quickly optimize storage costs across the largest and fastest growing buckets across the enterprise. Because the storage usage patterns vary widely across our top buckets, there was no clear-cut rule we could safely apply without taking on some operational overhead. The S3 Intelligent-Tiering storage class delivered automatic storage savings based on the changing access patterns of our data without impact on performance.

“Using S3 Intelligent-Tiering, we can implement storage changes without interruptions to service and activity. Our data is automatically moved to lower-cost tiers based on data access, saving us a lot of development time in addition to reducing costs. With that time, my team can focus on identifying other opportunities to reduce infrastructure costs in support of our organizational goals.

“Using S3 Intelligent-Tiering allowed us to use a ‘set-it-and-forget-it’ model for stored media content. Confident that frequently and infrequently accessed files are in their correct storage class and that costs are being kept to an efficient minimum, my team is able to focus on our mandate: deliver secure video content across the globe with cutting-edge technology.” D’Arcy Rail-Ip, VP Technology – CineSend Electronic Arts (EA) is a global leader in digital interactive entertainment.

To support our top games, our core telemetry systems routinely deal with 10s of petabytes, 10s of thousands of tables, and 2+ billion objects.
EA used S3 Intelligent-Tiering to optimize storage costs for their data lake with changing access patterns.
With minimal to no changes to our existing tools, we were able to reduce storage costs by 30% with S3 Intelligent-Tiering for data with unpredictable access patterns.

Sundeep Narravula, Principal Technical Director – EA Torc Robotics, a global leader and pioneer in trucking, offers a complete self-driving vehicle software and integration solution and is currently focusing on commercializing self-driving trucks. With Torc Robotics’s rapid growth, its S3 storage quickly grew to petabytes of data in S3 buckets that its vehicle data acquisition team was looking to optimize.

Content from the archive that sees a lot of interest is sorted into a frequent access tier, while content that draws less attention is stored in an infrequent access tier.
It used to be that we’d have to be selective about which content we’d retrieve from our deep archive, or in some cases, what we’d keep on the archive, but now it’s a no brainer.

Customers backup, relive, and share memories on Amazon Photos’ mobile, web, and desktop apps, and relive these memories on Amazon smart screen devices like Amazon Echo Show and Amazon Fire TV.
Since the launch of Amazon Photos, we have been using Amazon S3.
While S3 Standard storage was able to grow with the scale of our business, the need to optimize for cost and performance of a large (and growing) volume of data presented challenges.

Amazon S3 is the cornerstone of the data infrastructure of Zalando, and they have utilized S3 Storage Classes to optimize storage costs. “We are saving 37% annually in storage costs by using Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering to automatically move objects that have not been touched within 30 days to the infrequent-access tier.” Max Schultze, Lead Data Engineer – Zalando Teespring, an online platform that lets creators turn unique ideas into custom merchandise, experienced rapid business growth, and the company’s data also grew exponentially—to a petabyte—and continued to increase.

AppsFlyer stores data from its 100 billion events per day in a petabyte scale data lake on Amazon S3.
But had little insight when it came to whether objects older than 365 days would be accessed frequently again in the future, and thereby incur unexpected retrieval charges.
AppsFlyer needed a different solution and found it in S3 Intelligent-Tiering.

S3 Intelligent-Tiering allows us to make better use and be more cost efficient whenever we have to go to historical data and make changes on top of it.” Reshef Mann, CTO and Co-Founder – AppsFlyer Embark is building self-driving truck technology to make roads safer and improve the efficiency of transportation.

Engineers began pulling from years of historical data, pouring through thousands of hours of driving data to find scenarios of interest, and usied this data to build stronger simulations against which they could test their system.
With all of Embark’s data stored using the S3 Intelligent-Tiering storage class, Embark didn’t have to spend time thinking about which data should be available and how to move this data between different storage tiers in order to optimize costs while still enabling this sudden pattern of random data access into their data lake.

This post will help you walk away with a basic understanding of how to use S3 Storage Lens to identify typical cost savings opportunities, and how to take action to implement changes to realize those cost savings.
We launched S3 Intelligent-Tiering in 2018, which added the capability to take advantage of S3 without needing to have a deep understanding of your data access patterns.

With these use cases, a dataset can become infrequently and even rarely accessed at specific points in time.
The problem is that customers don’t know how data access patterns will change in the future.
In this blog post, we provide you with an easy-to-use mechanism to automate the creation of S3 Lifecycle rules at scale for all the buckets in your account to automatically transition your objects from S3 Standard to the S3 Intelligent-Tiering storage class.

To learn more, visit the,
The consists of AWS services, best practices, and tools to help customers save costs and accelerate migrations of storage workloads to AWS.
Reach your migration goals even faster with AWS services, best practices, tools, and incentives.
Workloads that are well suited for storage migration include on premises data lakes, large unstructured data repositories, file shares, home directories, backups, and archives.

When would you use S3 as opposed to EBS?

Amazon S3 vs EFS vs EBS Comparison – In summary, we distinguished a few specific features of all three storage services to help you choose between them: What Is S3 Intelligent Tiering

Amazon S3	Amazon EBS	Amazon EFS
Can be publicly accessible Web interface Object Storage Scalable Slower than EBS and EFS	Accessible only via the given EC2 Machine File System interface Block Storage Hardly scalable Faster than S3 and EFS	Accessible via several EC2 machines and AWS services Web and file system interface Object storage Scalable Faster than S3, slower than EBS
Good for storing backups and other static data	Is meant to be EC2 drive	Good for applications and shareable workloads

When to choose EBS over S3?

When to use EBS? EBS’s use case is more easily understood than the other two. It must be paired with an EC2 instance. So when you need a high-performance storage service for a single instance, use EBS.