Amazon Glacier | Billing Flashcards
Does the AWS Management Console support Amazon Glacier?
Billing
Amazon Glacier | Storage
Yes. The AWS Management Console allows you to create and configure vaults, allowing you to easily and quickly setup Glacier. Click here to go the AWS Management Console.
How much does Amazon Glacier cost?
Billing
Amazon Glacier | Storage
With Amazon Glacier, storage is priced from $0.004 per gigabyte per month, and you pay for what you use. There are no setup fees, and for most archive use cases your total costs will primarily be made up of your storage cost.
Upload requests are priced from $0.05 per 1,000 requests. In addition, archives stored in Glacier have a minimum 90 days of storage, and archives deleted before 90 days incur a pro-rated charge equal to the storage charge for the remaining days. As Amazon Glacier is designed to store data that is infrequently accessed and long lived, these charges will likely not apply to most of you.
We charge less where our costs are less. Some prices vary across Amazon Glacier Regions and are based on the location of your vault. There is no Data Transfer charge for data transferred between Amazon EC2 and Amazon Glacier within the same Region. Data transferred between Amazon EC2 and Amazon Glacier across all other Regions (e.g. between the Amazon EC2 Northern California and Amazon Glacier US East North Virginia Regions) will be charged at Internet Data Transfer rates on both sides of the transfer.
To learn more about Glacier pricing, please visit the Glacier pricing page.
How is my storage charge calculated?
Billing
Amazon Glacier | Storage
The volume of storage billed in a month is based on the average storage used throughout the month, measured in gigabyte-months (GB-Months). The size of each of your archives is calculated as the amount of data you upload plus an additional 32 kilobytes of data for indexing and metadata (e.g. your archive description). This extra data is necessary to identify and retrieve your archive. Here is an example of how to calculate your storage costs using US East (Northern Virginia) Region pricing:
If you upload 100,000 archives that are 1 gigabyte each, your total storage would be:
1.000032 gigabytes for each archive x 100,000 archives = 100,003.20 gigabytes
If you stored the archives for 1 month, you would be charged:
100,003.20 GB-Months x $0.004 = $400.01
If you upload 200,000 archives that are 0.5 gigabytes each, your total storage would be:
0.500032 gigabytes for each archive x 200,000 archives = 100,006.40 gigabytes
If you stored the archives for 1 month, you would be charged:
100,006.40 GB-Months x $0.004 = $400.03
Your storage is measured in “TimedStorage-ByteHrs,” which are added up at the end of the month to generate your monthly charges. For example, if you store an archive that is 1 gigabyte (inclusive of the 32 kilobyte overhead) for one day in the US East (Northern Virginia) Region, your storage usage would be:
1,073,741,824 bytes x 1 day x 24 hours = 25,769,803,776 Byte-Hours
Converting this to GB-Months (assuming a 30 day month) gives:
25,769,803,776 Byte-Hours x (1 GB / 1,073,741,824 bytes) x (1 month / 720 hours) = 0.03 GB-Months
So your storage charge for that day would be:
0.03 GB-Months x $0.004 = $0.00012
To learn more about Glacier pricing and view prices for other regions, please visit the Glacier pricing page.
Why do prices vary depending on which Amazon Glacier Region I choose?
Billing
Amazon Glacier | Storage
We charge less where our costs are less. For example, our costs are lower in the US East (North Virginia) Region than in the US West (Northern California) Region.
How will I be charged and billed for my use of Amazon Glacier?
Billing
Amazon Glacier | Storage
There are no setup fees to begin using the service. At the end of the month, your credit card will automatically be charged for that month’s usage. You can view your charges for the current billing period at any time on the Amazon Web Services web site, by logging into your Amazon Web Services account, and clicking “Account Activity” under “Your Web Services Account”.
How much data can I retrieve for free?
Billing
Amazon Glacier | Storage
Glacier offers a 10 GB retrieval free tier. You can retrieve 10 GB of your Amazon Glacier data per month for free. The free tier allowance can be used at any time during the month and applies to Standard retrievals.
How much does it cost to retrieve data from Amazon Glacier?
Billing
Amazon Glacier | Storage
There are three ways to retrieve data from Glacier and each has a different per-GB retrieval fee and per-archive request fee (i.e. requesting one archive counts as one request). Expedited retrievals cost $0.03 per GB and $0.01 per request. Standard retrievals cost $0.01 per GB and $0.05 per 1,000 requests. Bulk retrievals cost $0.0025 per GB and $0.025 per 1,000 requests.
For example, using Expedited retrievals, if you requested 10 archives with a size of 1 GB each, the cost would be 10 x $0.03 +10 x $0.01 = $0.40.
If you were using Standard retrievals to retrieve 500 archives that were 1 GB each, the cost would be 500GB x $0.01 + 500 x $0.05/1,000 = $5.025
Lastly, using Bulk retrievals, if you were to retrieve 500 archives that are 1 GB each, the cost would be 500GB x $0.0025 + 500 x $0.025/1,000 = $1.2625.
To learn more about Glacier pricing, please visit the Glacier pricing page.
How will I be charged when retrieving only a range of an archive?
Billing
Amazon Glacier | Storage
Range retrievals are priced in precisely the same way as regular retrievals from Amazon Glacier. You are charged a per-GB fee for only the amount of data retrieved in the range you specify.
How will I be charged for deleting data that is less than 3 months old?
Billing
Amazon Glacier | Storage
Amazon Glacier is designed for use cases where data is retained for months, years, or decades. Deleting data from Amazon Glacier is free if the archive being deleted has been stored for three months or longer. If an archive is deleted within three months of being uploaded, you will be charged an early deletion fee. In the US East (Northern Virginia) Region, you would be charged a prorated early deletion fee of $0.012 per gigabyte deleted within three months. So if you deleted 1 gigabyte of data 1 month after uploading it, you would be charged a $0.008 early deletion fee. If, instead you deleted 1 gigabyte after 2 months, you would be charged a $0.004 early deletion fee.
To view prices for other regions, visit the Glacier pricing page.
What can I expect the total cost of ownership (TCO) to be?
Billing
Amazon Glacier | Storage
Amazon Glacier is a secure, durable, and extremely low-cost cloud storage service for data archiving and long-term backup. Customers can reliably store large or small amounts of data for as little as $0.004 per gigabyte per month, a significant savings compared to on-premises solutions. To keep costs low yet suitable for varying retrieval needs, Amazon Glacier provides three options for access to archives, from a few minutes to several hours. Your total cost of ownership (TCO) for your Amazon Glacier storage will depend on your data access patterns. Below are several examples illustrating different use cases ranging from deep archives that are never retrieved to active workloads where large portions of data are accessed.
TCO example 1: Let’s assume that you upload 1 PB of data into Amazon Glacier, that the average archive size is 1 GB and that you never retrieve any data. When you first upload the 1 PB, there are upload request fees of 1,048,576 GB x $0.05 / 1,000 = $52.43. Then the ongoing storage costs are 1,048,576 GB x $0.004 = $4,194.30 per month, or $50,331.65 per year.
TCO example 2: Now let’s assume the same storage as example 1 and also assume that you retrieve 3 TB (3,072 GB) a day on average using Bulk retrievals and that the average archive size was 1 GB for a total of 3,072 archives. That’s 90 TB retrieved per month or 8.8% of your data per month. The total retrieval fees per day would be 3,072 x $0.0025 + 3,072 * $0.025 / 1,000 = $7.76, which equates to $232.70 per month and $2,792.45 per year. Adding storage costs, your annual TCO is $50,331.65 + $2,792.45 = $53,124.10. In this example, retrieval fees make up just 5.3% of your total Glacier fees. Your total monthly cost per GB stored including retrieval fees is $0.004222/GB.
TCO example 2: Now let’s assume the same storage as example 1 and also assume that you retrieve 1 TB (1,024 GB) a day on average using Standard retrievals and that occasionally you use Expedited retrievals for urgent requests, averaging 10 GB per day. Here, we assume the average archive size is 1 GB. That’s 30.3 TB per month or 3% of your data per month. The total retrieval fees per day would be (1,024 x $0.01 + 1,024 x $0.05 / 1000) + (10 x $0.03 + 10 x $0.01) = $10.69, which equates to $320.74 per month and $3,848.83 per year. Adding storage costs, your annual TCO is $50,331.65 + $3,848.83 = $54,180.48. In this example, retrieval fees make up just 7.1% of your total Glacier fees. Your total monthly cost per GB stored including retrieval fees is $0.0043/GB.
To learn more about Glacier pricing, please visit the Glacier pricing page.
