Amazon S3 Glacier

Amazon S3 Glacier is a very low-cost storage service, primarily targeted for data archiving and backup.

Storage is designed for storing infrequently accessed data with an expectation to return requested data in the tune of several hours (rather than milliseconds or even minutes)
You can store up to 40 TB per Archive, and can have unlimited Archives
- Each single upload request can be up to 4 GB
- For archives larger than 100 MB, it’s recommended to use Multipart upload capability
You can upload data directly to Glacier, or move via Lifecycle management policy
99.999999999% durability (eleven 9s)
3+ AZ replication
Supports SSL for data in transit and encryption for data at rest
90 day and 40 KB minimum charge; object retrieval fee
Retrieval: three configurable options, ranging from minutes to hours
You can leverage S3 Inventory report to get CSV, ORC, or Parquet file output of your Objects and associated Metadata on daily or weekly basis for an S3 Bucket or Prefix.

Archive

Data is stored in Glacier as an “archive” – each archive is a single file , or group of files as a zipped (zip, tar, etc.) file – still a single file
An archive can be up to 40 TB, and you can have unlimited number of archives
Each archive is immutable. That is – you cannot change existing archive. You can however delete and add a new one.

Vault

Vault is like a Storage Unit for your archive, which you can put lock on
Each Vault can have multiple Archives – this is how you can group together logical archives in single Vault
Each AWS Account can have up to 1,000 Vaults
You can attach notifications to the Vault
If you delete a Vault within 3 months of its creation date, you will be charged for a Deletion fee

Vault Lock

Vault Lock enables controls over the Vault via Vault Lock Policy
Lock is to keep your Vault safe by applying policies such as:
- No deletes allowed
- Multi-factor Authentication (MFA) required
Lock enables you to enforce compliance controls
Once locked, the Vault Lock Policy becomes immutable. Vault Lock ensures that a Lock Policy cannot be deleted or altered until there are no more Archives to protect in the Vault.

Access Policies

Vault Access Policy – you can define resource-based policies for your Vault, to specify who has access and what actions can be performed
User based Policy – you can define user-based policies for IAM users / groups / roles to specify what permissions (e.g., read / write / delete) do they have on your Vaults

There are three retrieval options to allow retrieval at different fetch speeds (at a cost) per your need:

Provisioned Capacity Units (PCUs) – you can purchase PCUs, which guarantees that your retrieval capacity for Expedited retrievals will be available when you need it.
- Each PCU ensures that at least 3 Expedited Retrievals can be performed every 5 minutes, at up to 150 MB/s of retrieval throughput.
Range Retrieval – enables you to retrieve part of an archive
- You specify a byte range that can start at zero (start of your archive), or at any 1 MB internal thereafter. The end of the range can be either the end of your archive, or any 1 MB interval greater than the start of your range.

Amazon S3 Glacier is billed for following components:

Storage – per GB per month
Retrieval
- Size – per GB
- Number of Requests – per 1,000 requests
- Price varies by associated Retrieval Time – Expedited / Standard / Buk
Provisioned Expedited Retrieval – per Provisioned Capacity Unit