Amazon S3 vs Glacier

Last updated on April 7, 2023

Amazon S3 is a durable, secure, simple, and fast storage service, while Amazon S3 Glacier is used for archiving solutions.
Use S3 if you need low latency or frequent access to your data. Use S3 Glacier for low storage cost, and you do not require millisecond access to your data.
You have three retrieval options when it comes to Glacier, each varying in the cost and speed it retrieves an object for you. You retrieve data in milliseconds from S3.
Both S3 and Glacier are designed for durability of 99.999999999% of objects across multiple Availability Zones.
S3 and Glacier are designed for availability of 99.99%.
S3 can be used to host static web content, while Glacier cannot.

In S3, users create buckets. In Glacier, users create archives and vaults.
You can store a virtually unlimited amount of data in both S3 and Glacier.
A single Glacier archive can contain 40TB of data.
S3 supports Versioning.
You can run analytics and querying on S3.
You can configure a lifecycle policy for your S3 objects to automatically transfer them to Glacier. You can also upload objects directly to either S3 or Glacier.
S3 Standard-IA and One Zone-IA have a minimum capacity charge per object of 128KB. Glacier’s minimum is 40KB.
Objects stored in S3 have a minimum storage duration of 30 days (except for S3 Standard). Objects that are archived to Glacier have a minimum 90 days of storage. Objects that are deleted, overwritten, or transitioned to a different storage class before the minimum duration will incur the normal usage charge plus a pro-rated request charge for the remainder of the minimum storage duration.
Glacier has a per GB retrieval fee.
You can transition objects from some S3 storage classes to another. Glacier objects can only be transitioned to the Glacier Deep Archive storage class.
S3 (standard, intelligent-tiering, standard-IA, and one zone-IA) and Glacier are backed by an SLA.

Written by: Jon Bonso

Jon Bonso is the co-founder of Tutorials Dojo, an EdTech startup and an AWS Digital Training Partner that provides high-quality educational materials in the cloud computing space. He graduated from Mapúa Institute of Technology in 2007 with a bachelor's degree in Information Technology. Jon holds 10 AWS Certifications and is also an active AWS Community Builder since 2020.

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