New – Tag Your Amazon Glacier Vaults

Amazon Glacier is a secure, durable, and extremely low-cost storage service for data archiving and online backup (see my post, Amazon Glacier: Archival Storage for One Penny Per GB Per Month for an introduction).

Since we introduced Glacier in the summer of 2012, we have made it even more useful by adding lifecycle management, data retrieval policies & audit logging, range retrieval, and vault access policies.

Tag Your Vaults
If you are already a Glacier user (or if you have read my intro), you know that you create archives and store them in Glacier vaults.

Today we are making Glacier even more useful by giving you the ability to tag your vaults. You can use these tags for cost allocation purposes (by department, group, or any other desired categorization) or for other forms of tracking.

Here’s how you tag a vault with a key named “Department”:

After you have tagged your vaults, you can use the AWS Cost Allocation Reports to view a breakdown of costs and usage by tag.

As part of today’s launch, we updated the design of the Glacier console. We also made some speed improvements and added a filtering mechanism to make it easier for you to locate a particular vault. For example, here are all of my “Backup” vaults:

This new feature is available now and you can start using it today! To learn more, read about Tagging Your Glacier Vaults.

— Jeff;