Posted On: Sep 16, 2015
We are excited to announce a new, lower-cost Amazon S3 storage class for data that is accessed less frequently. Amazon S3 Standard - Infrequent Access (Standard - IA) offers the high durability, low latency, and high throughput of Amazon S3 Standard, but with prices starting at $0.0125 per GB per month, $0.01 per GB retrieval fee, and a 30-day storage minimum. This combination of low cost and high performance makes Standard - IA ideal for long-term file storage, backups, and disaster recovery.
Additionally, effective September 1, 2015, we are decreasing the price of Amazon Glacier storage by up to 36% for the US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Ireland) regions. Today's price drop continues the AWS tradition of reducing our costs and passing the savings along to our customers. This price reduction will take effect automatically and no action is required on your part.
You can now choose between three Amazon S3 storage classes that are designed for 99.999999999% durability: Standard, Standard - IA, and Amazon Glacier. Amazon S3 Standard is secure, highly scalable object storage with very low latency, high throughput, and a Service Level Agreement (SLA) of 99.9% availability, making it suitable for a wide variety of applications and workloads that frequently access data such as business applications, dynamic web sites, content distribution, and big data analytics. For data that is less active, but must be immediately accessible when needed, the new Amazon S3 Standard - IA introduces a reduced per GB storage price, with an availability SLA of 99%. For longer-term archiving where immediate access is not required, Amazon Glacier is the lowest cost Amazon S3 storage option, available for as little as $0.007/GB per month.
Amazon S3 also allows you to define configurable lifecycle policies at the bucket level that will automatically move objects to the preferred storage option. For example, you can store data into the Amazon S3 Standard storage class, move it to Standard – IA 30 days after it has been uploaded, and then to Amazon Glacier 60 days later. These transitions happen without any changes to the application, or to the Amazon S3 bucket where the object is stored.
For more information on today's announcements, read the AWS blog and visit the Amazon S3 webpage.