Amazon S3 Storage Classes

Amazon S3 offers many storage classes for store information. You  can choose any storage class depending on your use case, scenario and performance requirements. Following are the all classes of S3 that you can use to put your objects or store information:

Storage for more frequently accessed objects :

for frequently accessed information, Amazon simple storage service provides the following storage classes:

• S3 Standard class — when you upload any object and you don’t specify the storage class, Amazon S3 store information in standard class by default.
• Less availability class — The less availability Storage storage class is designed for noncritical, reproducible data that does not require High Availability and Redundancy and accurate.

S3 Intelligent-class :

It further divided into 3 classes

• Frequent access
• Infrequent access
• Archieve instant access

Automatically stores objects in these classes .Objects that are uploaded to S3 Intelligent-class are automatically stored in the Frequent Access class and you cannot change this behavior.

S3 Intelligent-class works by access patterns and move the objects that have not been accessed for 30 consecutive days to the Infrequent Access class. With S3 Intelligent-class, any existing objects that have not been accessed for 90 consecutive days will move to the Archive Instant Access tier automatically.S3 Intelligent-class automatically moves objects that haven’t been accessed for 90 consecutive days to the Archive Access tier, and after 180 consecutive days of no any access, to the Deep Archive Access class.

Storage classes for infrequently accessed objects :

The S3 Standard-IA and S3 One Zone-lA

These boxes are used for infrequent accessed data for long-term (IA stands for infrequent access.) S3 Standard-IA and S3 One Zone-less frequent objects are available for millisecond access (similar to the S3 Standard storage class). Amazon S3 also charges a retrieval fee for these objects, so they are most suitable for infrequently accessed data. For example, you might choose the S3 Standard-IA and S3 One Zone-less infrequent storage classes to do the following:

• For storing backup data.
• For old data that is not accessed frequently but that still requires millisecond access when needed. For example, when you upload data, you might choose the S3 Standard storage class, and use lifecycle policies to tell Amazon S3 to transition the objects to the S3 Standard-less infrequent or S3 single Zone-less frequent class.

The S3 Standard-less infrequent and S3 single Zone-less infrequent storage classes are good for objects size greater than 128 KB that you store for 30 days. If an object sixe is smaller than 128 KB, Amazon S3 charges you for 128 KB. If you delete an object before the end of the thirty-day minimum storage duration period, you are charged for thirty day. There also many other retrieval options that you can use.

These storage classes differ as follows:

• S3 Standard-less inrequent — Amazon S3 stores the object data across multiple Availability Zones for High availability and redundancy (similar to the S3 Standard storage class). S3 Standard-IA objects are irrepressible to the loss of an Availability Zone. This storage class offers greater availability and resiliency than the S3 One Zone-IA class .Because it is stored in more than one Availability zones.
• S3 single Zone-less inrequent — Amazon S3 stores the object data in only one Availability Zone, and that’s why it is less expensive than S3 Standard-IA. However, there is no any chance of data recovery in term of  physical loss of the Availability Zone resulting from disasters, such as earthquakes and floods etc. The S3 One Zone-IA storage class is as durable as Standard-IA, but it is less available and less redundant. The reason is data is stored only in single Availability zone.

Best Recommendations:

• S3 Standard-less infrequent — Use for your primary or only copy of data that can’t be re-created.
• For secondary back-ups.
• S3 One Zone-less infrequent — Use if you can re-create the data if the Availability Zone fails, and for object replicas when setting S3 Cross-multiple region replication.

Storage classes for archiving objects :

It is also further divided in 3 classses ,

• S3 glacier instant retrieval
• S3 glacier flexible retrieval
• S3 glacier deep archieve

These storage classes are designed for low-cost data archiving. These storage classes offer the same durability, resiliency and redundancy as the S3 Standard and S3 Standard-IA storage classes provide. These storage classes differ as follows:

• S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval — Use for archiving data that is infrequently accessed and requires milliseconds retrieval. Data stored in the S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval storage class offers same latency and throughput performance as the Standard-less infrequent storage class and it is less expensive than standard. Glacier Instant Retrieval has higher data access costs than Standard-less frequent.
• S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval — it is used to access data immediately when needed. If you have overwritten, deleted, or transitioned to a different storage class an object before the minimum 90-day, you are charged for 90 days.

Retrieval Options:                                                                                                              

• Expedited retrieval :Retrieve data in 1-5 minutes
• Standard :Retrieve data in 3-5 hours
• Bulk :Retrieve data in 5-12 hours

• S3 Glacier Deep Archive — It is lowest cost option in amazon simple storage service. Use for archiving data that is accessed very infrequently or that rarely needs to be accessed. Data stored in the Glacier Deep Archive storage class has a minimum storage duration period of 180 days and a default retrieval time of 12 hours. If you have deleted, overwritten, modified, or transitioned to any other box class an object before the 180-day minimum, you are charged for complete 180 days
• S3 Glacier Deep Archive is the lowest cost storage class in AWS. Storage costs for Glacier Deep Archive are very less expensive than using the any other storage or storage class of AWS.

Retrieve Archived Objects

As we discussed earlier the retrieval options for other storage, we will also go through the retrieval options of archieved storages that are available.

You can set the storage class of an object to Glacier Flexible Retrieval or Glacier Deep Archive in the same ways that you do for the other storage classes of aws. However, the Glacier Flexible Retrieval and S3 Glacier Deep Archive objects are not available for real-time access. You can not access them directly through console. You must first restore the amazon Glacier Flexible Retrieval and amazon Glacier Deep Archive objects before you can access them.