Automates storage cost savings by moving data when access patterns change
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 $2 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.
Automatic savings
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99.999999999%
Lowest cost
Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering
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. There are no retrieval charges in S3 Intelligent-Tiering. If an object in the Infrequent or Archive Instant Access tier is accessed later, it’s automatically moved back to the Frequent Access tier. No additional tiering charges apply when objects are moved between access tiers 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
How it works — S3 Intelligent-Tiering
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Automatic Access tiers
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Opt-in asynchronous Deep Archive Access tier
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Both opt-in asynchronous Archive Access tiers
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Automatic Access tiers
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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. 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. To save even more on rarely accessed storage, view the additional diagrams to see the opt-in asynchronous Archive and Deep Archive Access tiers in S3 Intelligent-Tiering.
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. See the Amazon S3 Pricing page for more information. To learn more, visit the S3 Intelligent-Tiering user guide.
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Opt-in asynchronous Deep Archive Access tier
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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. 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 Restoring Archived Objects.
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. See the Amazon S3 Pricing page for more information. To learn more, visit the S3 Intelligent-Tiering user guide.
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Both opt-in asynchronous Archive Access tiers
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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. 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 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 Restoring Archived Objects.
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. See the Amazon S3 Pricing page for more information. To learn more, visit the S3 Intelligent-Tiering user guide.
Customers saving on storage with S3 Intelligent-Tiering
Shutterstock
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. Also, it has driven a shift in team focus from storage resource planning to true innovation."
Chris S. Borys, Team Manager, Cloud Storage Services - Shutterstock
Illumina
Illumina is a leading developer, manufacturer, and marketer of life science tools and systems for large-scale genetics analysis. Founded in 1998, Illumina offers a full range of software, instruments, and services that help its customers analyze genomes, make rapid advancements in life sciences research, and improve human health. Illumina’s customers use its genetic-sequencing solutions to accelerate therapeutic and pharmaceutical insights.
After just 3 months of using S3 Intelligent-Tiering, Illumina began to see significant monthly cost savings. For every 1 TB of data, the company saves 60 percent on storage costs. “I think it’s the biggest return on investment that we’ve ever seen,” says Al Maynard. Further, Illumina can provide its customers with near-instant access to thousands of whole genome sequences at a low, competitive cost, helping its customers accelerate their research and development.
Al Maynard, Director of Software Engineering - Illumina
Torc Robotics
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
Electronic Arts
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
Stripe
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. With the new Archive Instant Access tier, we anticipate automatically realizing the benefit of archive storage pricing, while retaining the ability to access our data instantly when needed."
Kalyana Chadalavada, Head of Efficiency - Stripe
GRAIL
GRAIL is a healthcare company focused on saving lives and improving health by pioneering new technologies for early cancer detection. GRAIL has built a multi-disciplinary organization of scientists, engineers, and physicians. They are using the power of next-generation sequencing, population-scale clinical studies, and state-of-the-art computer science and data science to overcome one of medicine’s greatest challenges.
"We transitioned most of our data to S3 Intelligent-Tiering, which led to 40 percent savings per gigabyte of storage cost.”
Olga Ignatova, Director of Software Development - GRAIL
CineSend
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
Zalando
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
Amazon Photos
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
Teespring
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.
Joyn
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
SimilarWeb
Using AWS, SimilarWeb manages large volumes of data, with which its data scientists build algorithms to improve its market-intelligence platform. By using S3 Intelligent-Tiering, SimilarWeb is able to democratize that data for its employees and save 20% on storage costs.
AppsFlyer
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
Capital One
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
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. With the new S3 Intelligent-Tiering Archive Instant Access Tier, we'll further reduce cost for many petabytes of autonomous vehicle data while keeping it immediately accessible for the use of our developers."
Yanor Barros, Director of Cloud Infrastructure Development - Mobileye
Epic Games
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
Embark
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.
S3 Intelligent-Tiering resources
Tech Talk: Optimizing storage costs using Amazon S3
Overview: Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering
Demo: Using Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering
Session: Best practices for cost optimization with Amazon S3
S3 Intelligent-Tiering blog posts
S3 cost optimization for predictable and dynamic access patterns
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.
5 Ways to reduce data storage costs using Amazon S3 Storage Lens
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.
S3 Intelligent-Tiering Adds Opt-in Archive Access Tiers
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.
Automatically archive and restore data with Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering
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.
Automate S3 Lifecycle rules at scale to transition data to S3 Intelligent-Tiering
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.
Get started with S3 Intelligent-Tiering
You can configure S3 Intelligent-Tiering as the default storage class for newly created data by specifying INTELLIGENT-TIERING on your S3 PUT API request header. 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 S3 Intelligent-Tiering user guide.
Start saving today - migrate your storage to Amazon S3
The AWS Migration Acceleration Program for Storage 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. Learn more about the Storage Migration Acceleration Program »
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