Glacier

💡 Definition

Amazon S3 Glacier is a secure, durable, and extremely low-cost cloud storage service for data archiving and long-term backup. It is designed to provide significant cost savings compared to on-premises solutions.

🔑 Key Concepts

• Archive Storage: Optimized for infrequently accessed data where retrieval times of several hours are acceptable.
• Vaults: Data is stored in Vaults, which are containers for archives.
• Archives: The actual data stored in Glacier (can be any data type, up to 40TB).
• Retrieval Options:
  • Expedited: 1-5 minutes (most expensive).
  • Standard: 3-5 hours.
  • Bulk: 5-12 hours (least expensive).

⚙️ How it Works

1. Upload Data: Upload data directly to Glacier Vaults or use S3 Lifecycle Policies to transition old data from S3 to Glacier.
2. Data Retrieval: To access data, you initiate a retrieval request, choosing one of the retrieval options.

🎯 Use Cases

• Long-term Backup: Storing historical data, legal archives, medical records.
• Disaster Recovery: Off-site storage of critical data for recovery plans.

💰 Pricing Model

• Storage: Extremely low cost per GB per month.
• Data Retrieval: Charged based on the amount of data retrieved and the retrieval option chosen.
• Requests: Charged per request.

📝 Exam Tips (CLF-C02)

• Glacier is specifically for archiving data.
• Retrieval times are measured in hours, not seconds.
• It's designed for infrequently accessed data.
• Very low cost storage option.

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See Also: * S3 * Storage Classes