Amazon Glacier brought a revolution and is a game-changer. Data archiving and backups have never been the same since. Amazon Web Services performs all of the operational heavy lifting required for data retention, and you pay nothing upfront, pay a very low price for storage, and can scale your usage up or down as desired. Today, Amazon Glacier is regarded as a top-tier storage option that is both stable and long-lasting.
Furthermore, Data archiving is usually overpriced. For starters, companies must pay a large upfront fee for their archiving solution. Note that this does not include the ongoing cost for operational expenses such as power, facilities, staffing, and maintenance. Second, since organizations must estimate their capacity needs, they understandably over-provision to ensure they have adequate capacity for data redundancy and unforeseen expansion. As a consequence of these conditions, there is underutilization of capacity.
What is Amazon Glacier?
Amazon Glacier is a cloud-based storage service offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS). It is designed for secure, durable, and low-cost storage of infrequently accessed data. Unlike other Amazon Web Services, Glacier is primarily intended for long-term storage and backup of data, rather than for quick access or retrieval.
Glacier stores data in “vaults” and charges customers based on the amount of data stored, the number of requests for access, and the amount of data retrieved. It offers several retrieval options, each with different speeds and costs, depending on the customer’s needs.
Since its launch, Amazon Glacier has become a popular choice for businesses and individuals looking for a cost-effective and scalable way to store their data. It has also been integrated with other AWS services, such as AWS Snowball, to provide a complete data archiving and backup solution for customers.
Customers may store data for as low as $1 per terabyte per month, which represents a considerable cost reduction over on-premises alternatives. Furthermore, Amazon Glacier offers three access choices for archives, ranging from a few minutes to several hours, and S3 Glacier Deep Archive offers two access options, ranging from 12 to 48 hours, to keep costs low while meeting a variety of retrieval demands.
AWS Glacier Terminology:
Before moving further, make sure you’re familiar with the AWS Glacier Terminology:
1. Archives
- Data is stored in “archive” in Amazon S3 Glacier. An archive may hold any type of content, including photographs, videos, and documents. You can archive a single file or combine numerous files into a TAR or ZIP file and upload it as a single archive.
- Objects in S3 are identical to Archives in AWS Glacier. A single archive might be as large as 40 terabytes.
- You may save an unlimited number of archives and data in your account. Furthermore, each archive is given a unique archive ID at the moment of creation, and the content of the archive is immutable, meaning it cannot be modified once it is generated.
2. Vaults
- Vaults are virtual data storage containers. Buckets in S3 are analogous to vaults in AWS Glacier.
- You can see a list of your vaults in the AWS Management Console and use the AWS SDKs to do things like create vaults, delete vaults, lock vaults, show vault information, get vault inventory, tag vaults for filtering, and configure vault alerts.
- You may also use access policies to permit or restrict particular actions to users for each vault. Vaults are also region-specific.
What are the features of AWS Glacier?
The key features of AWS Glacier are :
1. Data Retrieval
Expedited, Standard, and Bulk retrievals are available for your archives in Amazon S3 Glacier to satisfy varied access time and cost needs. Standard retrievals take 3–5 hours, but expedited retrievals are frequently accessible in 1–5 minutes.
2. Amazon S3 Glacier Select
Without needing to obtain the complete archive, Amazon S3 Glacier Select allows queries to execute directly on the data saved. S3 Glacier Select can help you save money and gain new insights from your archive data.
3. Vault Lock
Amazon S3 Glacier Vault Lock lets you use a lockable policy to simply create and enforce compliance restrictions on individual S3 Glacier vaults. You may implement restrictions like “Write Once Read Many” (WORM) and lock the policy against future revisions in a Vault Lock policy. The policy becomes immutable once lock and Amazon S3 Glacier will enforce the required controls to help you meet your compliance goals.
4. Access control
AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) by Amazon S3 Glacier helps you securely monitor access to AWS and your Amazon S3 Glacier data.
5.Tagging support
Tags are labels that you can define and associate with your vaults, and using tags adds filtering capabilities to operations such as AWS cost reports. Amazon S3 Glacier allows you to tag your S3 Glacier vaults for easier resource and cost management.
6. Audit logs
AWS CloudTrail, which tracks Amazon S3 Glacier API calls for your account and delivers these log files to you, facilitates audit logging with Amazon S3 Glacier. These log files give you insight into what’s going on with your Amazon assets.
“Why Choose Amazon Glacier?”
Amazon Glacier helps to secure data by storing it redundantly on multiple devices using multiple facilities. Moreover, AWS Glacier has a Data Integrity Check that monitors the data in the Glacier on a regular basis. However, the following are some of the reasons why you should use AWS Glacier
➼ Durability and Scalability
Amazon Glacier runs on the world’s largest international cloud infrastructure. It offers 99.999999999% of durability. Within an AWS Region, data is automatically spread across a minimum of three physical Availability Zones that are geographically separated.
➼ Quick Retrievals
Amazon Glacier offers three retrieval options to fit your needs. Expedited retrievals are ideal for Active Archive use cases since they generally deliver data in 1-5 minutes. Standard retrievals take about 3-5 hours to complete and are ideal for less time-sensitive tasks like backup data or media editing. Bulk retrievals are the most cost-effective option, with vast amounts of data returned in 5 to 12 hours.
➼ Comprehensive Security & Compliance Capabilities
Amazon S3 Glacier provides three forms of encryption and connects with AWS CloudTrail to track, record, and retain storage API call activity for auditing. Security requirements and enforcement certifications supported by this storage group include SEC Rule 17a-4, PCI-DSS, HIPAA/HITECH, FedRAMP, EU GDPR, and FISMA. Furthermore, Amazon S3 Object Lock supports WORM storage, allowing you to fulfill compliance requirements for practically any regulatory agency on the planet.
➼ Budget Friendly
The Amazon S3 Glacier and S3 Glacier Deep Archive storage classes are the most cost-effective, allowing you to archive large amounts of data for relatively little money. For use cases like data lakes, analytics, IoT, machine learning, compliance, and media asset preservation, this makes it possible to save all of the data you desire. There are also no minimum commitments or upfront fees, and you just pay for what you use.
Use Cases of Amazon Glacier
Are you curious about Amazon Glacier’s potential applications? We’ve put together a comprehensive list of Amazon Glacier’s most popular and relevant practical applications.
‣ Media Asset Workflows
Companies that deal with digital material, such as news clips, huge film and game projects, relevant clippings, and others, must keep or preserve this media so that it may be used in the future. Digital material is often bigger, having the ability to grow to many petabytes in size over time. Furthermore, the Amazon S3 Glacier and S3 Glacier Deep Archive storage classes make it simple to archive older media assets and move it to Amazon S3 when needed.
‣ Healthcare Information Archiving
To meet regulatory requirements, hospital systems must keep petabytes of patient records (LIS, PACS, EHR, etc.) for decades. The Amazon S3 Glacier and S3 Glacier Deep Archive storage classes make it possible to safely archive patient record data at a low cost.
‣ Regulatory And Compliance Archiving
Businesses are necessary to archive data in order to comply with a range of enforcement rules. Regulatory and compliance records must be kept for lengthy periods of time in many industries, including financial services and healthcare. The banking and healthcare industries, in particular, need the preservation of particularly sensitive data. AWS Glacier also assists you in establishing compliance controls to fulfill business goals, such as SEC Rule 17a-4 (f).
‣ Scientific Data Storage
Research organizations produce, analyze and archive large Large quantities of scientific data. However, you can escape the challenges of hardware and facility management and space planning by using Amazon S3 Glacier storage classes.
‣ Digital Preservation
Libraries and government agencies encounter data-integrity challenges as part of their digital preservation activities. The storage aspects are costly, and they must maintain on a regular basis to assure protection and dependability. Amazon Glacier is a great alternative and solution for this. Unlike typical systems that need time-consuming data verification and human maintenance, Amazon Glacier performs frequent, extensive data integrity checks and has completely automated self-healing capabilities.
‣ Magnetic Tape Replacement
Tape libraries, whether on-site or off-site continue to be in some applications. Although, they can help save money on storage, but they come with hefty upfront costs and require advanced maintenance. As a managed facility, Amazon Glacier plans to take care of all facets of tape library overhead management. Furthermore, the great thing about Amazon Glacier is that there are no upfront costs. It has a price structure that allows you to pay only for the operations you need.
‣ Amazon Glacier Deep Archive
Amazon plans to update all of its services with new functionality. In order to achieve this, AWS Deep Archive, a new storage class associated with Glacier, has been developed. Deep Archive plans to keep the data for a long time, perhaps more than a decade. Also, Deep Archive aims to lower the cost of preserving critical data for regulatory compliance and government archives. As a result, you might infer that Deep Archive is a viable option for extremely long-term storage.
What is the pricing of Amazon Glacier?
The pricing mechanism for Amazon Glacier allows you to pay only for the operations that you utilize. It has a substantial free tier. The AWS Free Use Tier allows you to recover up to 10 GB of Amazon S3 Glacier data for free each month. Standard retrievals are eligible for the free tier allotment, which can utilize at any time throughout the month. Only retrieval requests, not data uploads to Amazon Glacier, are charged by the platform. It’s built up this manner to prevent users from solely depending on it for their data storage needs, and instead, use it to store files archives of seldom used material.
Final Words
Amazon Glacier is likely to continue to evolve and improve as data storage needs and technologies change. As businesses and individuals generate ever-increasing amounts of data, the need for reliable and affordable storage solutions will only grow. Amazon Glacier’s focus on long-term, low-cost storage and backup makes it a valuable tool for meeting these needs, and it will likely continue to be an important part of Amazon’s cloud-based offerings.
- Improved integration with other AWS services for easier data transfer and management
- Enhanced security and compliance features, such as encryption and data access controls
- Expanded retrieval options for faster access to data
- Greater scalability for handling larger volumes of data
- Integration with machine learning and AI tools for advanced data analysis
