If you need an affordable, secure way to preserve vast amounts of data for months or years, AWS Glacier is likely your ideal solution. As an archive-focused storage tier within Amazon S3, Glacier allows enterprises, researchers, healthcare groups, and more to reliably offload "cold" datasets while cutting storage costs by up to 80%.
But what exactly is Glacier, how can you integrate it into workflows, and what alternatives exist? Below we’ll explore everything you need to know about maximizing this innovative cloud archive service.
What is AWS Glacier and How Does It Enable Deep Data Archiving?
AWS Glacier is an Amazon S3 cloud storage class optimized purely for "cold" data archiving. This refers to any data accessed less than once per quarter that must be retained and preserved for months or years due to policy/compliance requirements.
Key Glacier Capabilities:
- Ultra-low cost – Starting at just $0.004 per GB/month
- Secure – Encrypts archives automatically using 256-bit AES keys
- Durable – Leverages Amazon S3 infrastructure for 99.9999999% (11 9‘s) of annual durability
- Flexible Access – Retrieve archives within 1-5 mins or opt for slower access to save on costs
- Easy Integration – Interacts with other AWS services like Lambda, RDS, CloudTrail
For example, imagine a hospital needing to preserve medical imaging records for decades at a time. This data is rarely accessed once stored, yet it must remain intact and be accessible when required.
Glacier provisions specialized infrastructure for managing these sprawling archives that traditional databases struggle with. It acts as a secure destination for cool datasets that must be cost efficient to store over 10, 20+ year timeframes.
Under the hood, Glacier is architected for asynchronous data retrieval. Rather than offer instant availability, restoring archives requires initiating user-configured processes. This design prioritizes economics over latency, given archived records by definition are infrequently needed.
There are three main Glacier retrieval types:
| Retrieval Method | Data Access Time | Fee per GB |
|---|---|---|
| Expedited | 1 to 5 minutes | $0.03 per GB |
| Standard | 3 to 5 hours | $0.01 per GB |
| Bulk | 5 to 12 hours | $0.025 per GB |
By allowing some lag in accessing records through Standard retrievals, costs decrease substantially. Yet when truly urgent, Expedited returns data rapidly. This balance enables supporting a spectrum of archive use cases.
Now that we‘ve clarified the core value proposition and technical architecture behind AWS Glacier, let‘s analyze some primary examples demonstrating its effectiveness for cost-optimized cloud archiving.
Major Use Cases Driving Glacier Adoption
While every industry has growing data archival needs, a few stand out in terms of aligning well with Glacier‘s capabilities specifically:
Long-term Retention for Compliance & Audit History
Financial services groups and insurance providers often must preserve records like contracts and filings for over seven years. This data is accessed perhaps 1-2 times annually at most.
By leveraging Glacier‘s $0.004 per GB monthly charge for archive storage, these organizations maintain compliance cheaply:
In this example, Glacier reduces compliance storage costs by over 80% relative to general-purpose S3 — yielding over $250,000 in savings for a large firm over 7 years.
Affordable Storage for Rich Media Assets
Storing decades worth of older video footage, images, CAD files, scientific research, and more gets extremely expensive over time. Yet this content has latent value for future projects.
With Glacier priced 96% less than Amazon EBS cold HDD storage, companies can now preserve these assets cost effectively:
Whether ensuring decades worth of clinical trial research remains accessible or a news network retaining millions of hours of historical footage, Glacier empowers affordable archiving at scale.
Migrating Data Archives to the Cloud Has Never Been More Affordable
Legacy on-premise archives built atop tapes or proprietary systems incur heavy operational burdens around maintenance, scaling capacity, and ensuring data resilience. Glacier changes this equation by enabling secure, durable cloud archives managed completely by AWS.
This effectively makes migrating archives to the cloud cost neutral while unlocking major quality of life and data accessibility advantages.
The 10-year TCO comparison above illustrates how Glacier eliminates exorbitant archive infrastructure expenses. Beyond drastic opex savings, organizations also gain improved archive search, data analytics integration, flexible access controls, and integration with complementary AWS services.
Unlocking Glacier‘s Potential by Pairing with Other AWS Services
While Glacier offers unmatched economics for cold storage independently, its value grows substantially when integrated with the greater AWS ecosystem.
For example, by linking Glacier workflows with AWS Lambda event-driven serverless compute, archival can be triggered dynamically whenever new objects land in Amazon S3 buckets.
The python snippet below gives a sense of this serverless automation approach:
import boto3
s3 = boto3.client("s3")
glacier = boto3.client("glacier")
def lambda_handler(event, context):
# Get reference to new S3 object
bucket = event["Records"][0]["s3"]["bucket"]["name"]
obj_key = event["Records"][0]["s3"]["object"]["key"]
# Initiate archive to Glacier vault
archive_id = glacier.initiate_archive_retrieval(
vaultName="DataArchiveVault",
archiveId=f"archives/{obj_key}"
)
# Notify user of archival status
sns.publish(TopicArn="GlacierArchiveTopic",
Message=f"Archived s3://{bucket}/{obj_key} to Glacier")
return {
"status": "ArchiveSuccessful"
}This function could run each time new files hit an S3 bucket, automatically flowing aged data into ultra-low cost Glacier archives.
Beyond serverless integration, Glacier also interoperates with AWS migration tools like AWS DataSync to simplify shifting tape-based archives to the cloud. It also works with security services like Amazon Macie to spot sensitive data for compliance.
Evaluating Alternatives to AWS Glacier Storage
While Glacier provides arguably the most mature and enterprise-ready cloud archive solution, competitors do exist in the space.
Top Glacier alternatives include:
- Azure Archive Tier – Microsoft‘s archival storage tier priced similarly to Glacier but with higher data egress fees. Integrates better into Windows infrastructure.
- Backblaze B2 – Extremely low cost cloud storage good for archiving, but lacking some larger enterprise capabilities.
- Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage – More affordable than AWS S3 standard with archive capabilities, but priced higher than Glacier for archival specifically.
Choosing amongst these options depends largely on your existing cloud vendor relationships and tooling standards. Yet Glacier remains the undisputed leader for affordability and robust archival functionality at web-scale.
Get Started Archiving for 80% Less with AWS Glacier
Hopefully this guide has shown why modern cloud data archiving strategies should have Glacier at their core. Its unparalleled economics and durable infrastructure enable preserving data for longerperiods while accessing it just as easily.
To start archiving immediately for massive savings over tapes or on-premise disk solutions, here are quick steps for getting started with Glacier:
- Sign-up for an AWS account
- Create an S3 bucket to serve as the interface for Glacier
- Provision a Glacier vault within the same AWS region as your bucket
- Install the AWS CLI to script archive transfers easily
- Set lifecycle rules to transition objects from S3 to Glacier automatically
- Monitor archives with CloudWatch and run test retrievals
Within an hour, you can start archiving mass data to the cloud for superior economics and resilience — opening the doors to preserving information over far longer timeframes than ever possible previously.
Diagrams created by author using Cloudcraft.io‘s visual AWS architecture design tool.
