Storage | Amazon Glacier Flashcards
What is Amazon Glacier?
General
Amazon Glacier | Storage
Amazon Glacier is an extremely low-cost storage service that provides secure, durable, and flexible storage for data backup and archival. With Amazon Glacier, customers can reliably store their data for as little as $0.004 per gigabyte per month. Amazon Glacier enables customers to offload the administrative burdens of operating and scaling storage to AWS, so that they don’t have to worry about capacity planning, hardware provisioning, data replication, hardware failure detection and repair, or time-consuming hardware migrations.
How can businesses, government and other organizations benefit from Amazon Glacier?
General
Amazon Glacier | Storage
Amazon Glacier enables any business or organization to easily and cost effectively retain data for months, years, or decades. With Amazon Glacier, customers can now cost effectively retain more of their data for future analysis or reference, and they can focus on their business rather than operating and maintaining their storage infrastructure. Customers seeking compliance storage can deploy compliance controls using Vault Lock to meet regulatory and compliance archiving requirements.
How should I choose between Amazon Glacier and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)?
General
Amazon Glacier | Storage
Amazon S3 is a durable, secure, simple, and fast storage service designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. Use Amazon S3 if you need low latency or frequent access to your data. Use Amazon Glacier if low storage cost is paramount, and you do not require millisecond access to your data.
What kind of data can I store?
General
Amazon Glacier | Storage
You can store virtually any kind of data in any format. You can also deploy compliance storage controls with Vault Lock to store regulatory and compliance archives in an immutable, Write Once Read Many (WORM) format. Please refer to the Amazon Web Services Licensing Agreement for details.
What does Amazon do with my data in Amazon Glacier?
General
Amazon Glacier | Storage
Amazon will store your data and track its associated usage for billing purposes. Amazon will not otherwise access your data for any purpose outside of the Amazon Glacier offering, except if required to do so by law. Please refer to the Amazon Web Services Licensing Agreement for details.
How do I use Amazon Glacier?
General
Amazon Glacier | Storage
Amazon Glacier provides a simple, standards-based REST web services interface as well as Java and .NET SDKs. The AWS Management console can be used to quickly set up Amazon Glacier. Data can then be uploaded and retrieved programmatically. View our documentation for more information on the Glacier APIs and SDKs.
How durable is Amazon Glacier?
Getting Started
Amazon Glacier | Storage
Amazon Glacier is designed to provide average annual durability of 99.999999999% for an archive. The service redundantly stores data in multiple facilities and on multiple devices within each facility. To increase durability, Amazon Glacier synchronously stores your data across multiple facilities before returning SUCCESS on uploading archives. Glacier performs regular, systematic data integrity checks and is built to be automatically self-healing.
How is data within Amazon Glacier organized?
Getting Started
Amazon Glacier | Storage
You store data in Amazon Glacier as an archive. Each archive is assigned a unique archive ID that can later be used to retrieve the data. An archive can represent a single file or you may choose to combine several files to be uploaded as a single archive. You upload archives into vaults. Vaults are collections of archives that you use to organize your data.
How much data can I store?
Getting Started
Amazon Glacier | Storage
There is no maximum limit to the total amount of data that can be stored in Amazon Glacier. Individual archives are limited to a maximum size of 40 terabytes.
What is the minimum amount of data that I can store using Amazon Glacier?
Getting Started
Amazon Glacier | Storage
There is no minimum limit to the amount of data that can be stored in Amazon Glacier and individual archives can be from 1 byte to 40 terabytes.
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.
Do your prices include taxes?
Security
Amazon Glacier | Storage
Except as otherwise noted, our prices are exclusive of applicable taxes and duties, including VAT and applicable sales tax. For customers with a Japanese billing address, use of AWS services is subject to Japanese Consumption Tax. Learn more.
How do I control access to my data?
Security
Amazon Glacier | Storage
By default, only you can access your data. In addition, you can control access to your data in Amazon Glacier by using the AWS Identity and Access Management (AWS IAM) service. You simply set up an AWS IAM policy that specifies which users within an account have rights to operations on a given vault.
Is my data encrypted?
Security
Amazon Glacier | Storage
Yes, all data in the service will be encrypted on the server side. Amazon Glacier handles key management and key protection for you. Amazon Glacier uses one of the strongest block ciphers available, 256-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES-256). 256-bit is the largest key size defined for AES. Customers wishing to manage their own keys can encrypt data prior to uploading it.
Does Amazon Glacier support IAM permissions?
Archives and Vaults
Amazon Glacier | Storage
Yes, Glacier will support API-level permissions through AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) service integration
For more information about IAM, go to:
AWS Identity and Access Management
AWS Identity and Access Management Getting Started Guide
Using AWS Identity and Access Management
What is an archive?
Archives and Vaults
Amazon Glacier | Storage
An archive is a durably stored block of information. You store your data in Amazon Glacier as archives. You may upload a single file as an archive, but your costs will be lower if you aggregate your data. TAR and ZIP are common formats that customers use to aggregate multiple files into a single file before uploading to Amazon Glacier. The total volume of data and number of archives you can store are unlimited. Individual Amazon Glacier archives can range in size from 1 byte to 40 terabytes. The largest archive that can be uploaded in a single Upload request is 4 gigabytes. For items larger than 100 megabytes, customers should consider using the Multipart upload capability. Archives stored in Amazon Glacier are immutable, i.e. archives can be uploaded and deleted but cannot be edited or overwritten.
How do I delete archives?
Archives and Vaults
Amazon Glacier | Storage
You can delete an archive at any time. You will stop being billed for your archive when your delete request succeeds at which point the archive itself will be inaccessible. Archives that are deleted within 3 months of being uploaded will be charged a deletion fee (see billing section for more details).
How do I upload large archives?
Archives and Vaults
Amazon Glacier | Storage
When uploading large archives (100MB or larger), you can use multi-part upload to achieve higher throughput and reliability. Multi-part uploads allow you to break your large archive into smaller chunks that are uploaded individually. Once all the constituent parts are successfully uploaded, they are combined into a single archive.
What is a vault?
Archives and Vaults
Amazon Glacier | Storage
A vault is a way to group archives together in Amazon Glacier. You organize your data in Amazon Glacier using vaults. Each archive is stored in a vault of your choice. You may control access to your data by setting vault-level access policies using the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) service. You can also attach notification policies to your vaults. These enable you or your application to be notified when data that you have requested for retrieval is ready for download. Click here to learn more about setting up notifications using the Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS).
How many vaults can I create?
Archives and Vaults
Amazon Glacier | Storage
You can create up to 1,000 vaults per account per region.
How do I effectively manage my Amazon Glacier vaults?
Archives and Vaults
Amazon Glacier | Storage
Amazon Glacier allows you to tag your Glacier vaults for easier resource and cost management. Tags are labels that you can define and associate with your vaults, and using tags adds filtering capabilities to operations such as AWS cost reports. For example, you can use tags to allocate Glacier costs and usage across multiple departments in your organization or by any other categorization. You can tag your vaults by using the Glacier Console or the Glacier APIs. For more information see Tagging Your Amazon Glacier Vaults.
How do I delete a vault?
Vault Access Policies
Amazon Glacier | Storage
You may delete any Glacier vault that does not contain any archives using the AWS Management Console, the Amazon Glacier APIs or the SDKs. Once a vault has been deleted, you can then re-create a vault with the same name. If your vault contains archives, you must delete all the archives before deleting the vault.
