November 22, 2016 / by Craig Shepherd

Good news, everyone! AWS S3 & Glacier is about to get cheaper

Jeff Barr, the Chief Evangelist for Amazon Web Services’ yesterday announced that prices for its S3 and Glacier storage services are dropping, as well as new data retrieval options for Glacier.

The latest price cuts reduce prices for Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) by up to 23.64%, with AWS Glacier prices dropping by approximately 43%.

S3 pricing tiers have also been simplified and consolidated from six to three new tiers.

Using AWS Glacier in your Disaster Recovery solution just got cheaper

Glacier, the low-cost data archiving service now lets you decide how to retrieve your data, by giving you three options:

• Standard
• Expedited
• Bulk

Standard retrieval is what you’ll already know if you use Glacier. Your archived data is typically retrieved in 3 to 5 hours

Expedited retrieval is much faster, with your archived data typically available in 1-5 minutes. This could be the best solution for your business if you store over 100 TB of data and need to make infrequent, but urgent requests to retrieve subsets of your data.

Bulk retrieval is the best option if you need to retrieve large amounts of data, but you’re happy to wait 5-12 hours for it to be available to use. Perfect for non-urgent situations, as this option costs approximately 75% less than Standard retrieval!

The Glacier and S3 price cuts come into effect from 1st December 2016, but the new glacier retrieval options are available for your vaults now. To see Data retrieval costs, see Amazon Glacier Pricing for more details

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