AWS S3 Storage Classes Overview
• Amazon S3 storage classes are designed to sustain the concurrent loss of data
in one or two facilities
• S3 storage classes allows lifecycle management for automatic migration of
objects for cost savings
• S3 storage classes support SSL encryption of data in transit and data
encryption at rest
• S3 also regularly verifies the integrity of your data using checksums and
provides auto healing capability
Standard
• Storage class is ideal for performance-sensitive use cases and frequently
accessed data and is designed to sustain the loss of data in a two facilities
• STANDARD is the default storage class, if none specified during upload
• Low latency and high throughput performance
• Designed for durability of 99.999999999% of objects
• Designed for 99.99% availability over a given year
• Backed with the Amazon S3 Service Level Agreement for availability.
Standard IA
• S3 STANDARD_IA (Infrequent Access) storage class is optimized for long-
lived and less frequently accessed data for e.g. backups and older data where
access is limited, but the use case still demands high performance
• STANDARD_IA is designed to sustain the loss of data in a two facilities
• STANDARD_IA objects are available for real-time access.
• STANDARD_IA storage class is suitable for larger objects greater than 128 KB
(smaller objects are charged for 128KB only) kept for at least 30 days.
• Same low latency and high throughput performance of Standard
• Designed for durability of 99.999999999% of objects
• Designed for 99.9% availability over a given year
• Backed with the Amazon S3 Service Level Agreement for availability
Reduced Redundancy Storage – RRS
• Reduced Redundancy Storage (RRS) storage class is designed for noncritical,
reproducible data stored at lower levels of redundancy than the STANDARD
storage class, which reduces storage costs
• Designed for durability of 99.99% of objects
• Designed for 99.99% availability over a given year
• Lower level of redundancy results in less durability and availability
• RRS stores objects on multiple devices across multiple facilities, providing
400 times the durability of a typical disk drive,
• RRS does not replicate objects as many times as S3 standard storage and is
designed to sustain the loss of data in a single facility.
• If an RRS object is lost, S3 returns a 405 error on requests made to that object
• S3 can send an event notification, configured on the bucket, to alert a user or
start a workflow when it detects that an RRS object is lost which can be used
to replace the lost object
Glacier
• GLACIER storage class is suitable for archiving data where data access is
infrequent and retrieval time of several (3-5) hours is acceptable.
• GLACIER storage class uses the very low-cost Amazon Glacier storage service,
but the objects in this storage class are still managed through S3
• Designed for durability of 99.999999999% of objects
• GLACIER cannot be specified as the storage class at the object creation time
but has to be transitioned fromSTANDARD, RRS, or STANDARD_IA to
GLACIER storage class using lifecycle management.
• For accessing GLACIER objects,
▪ object must be restored which can taken anywhere between 3-5 hours
▪ objects are only available for the time period (number of days) specified
during the restoration request
▪ object’s storage class remains GLACIER
▪ charges are levied for both the archive (GLACIER rate) and the copy
restored temporarily (RRS rate)
• Vault Lock feature enforces compliance via a lockable policy
