Posted on by greg

How I saved money storing more data on aws s3 simple storage service #blogtobertech

How I saved money storing more data on aws s3 simple storage service #blogtobertech

How I saved money storing more data on aws s3 simple storage service

How I saved money storing more data on aws s3 simple storage service is an example of reducing cloud costs as opposed to merely cutting cloud costs. What this means is that instead of just cutting my cloud storage costs with a focus on how much I could save, I wanted to remove some costs while also storing more data without compromise. For example, since making the changes, storage capacity usage has almost doubled, yet prices are remaining 37% lower from two years ago before the changes were made.

How I saved money storing more data on aws s3?

Without adding any context, the typical reaction might be that I saved money storing more data on (or in) AWS S3 as opposed to locally on-site (on-prem). Another typical response would be that I moved all of my data from a different more expensive cloud service to AWS S3. Yet another common reaction would that I moved my AWS S3 data into AWS Glacier cold storage, or, deleted a large amount of data.

Some might even comment that I must have used some type of dedupe, compression or other data footprint reduction (DFR) technology. On the other hand, some might determine that I probably did all or some of the above, or, leveraged AWS tiered storage, aligning different storage classes to the type of data activity.

How I saved money storing more data in AWS S3 actually involved spending some money, to eventually save money by leveraging different S3 storage classes. As part of rebalancing or moving different data to its new storage class, some one-time charges were incurred which recouped after several months of savings. The costs pertained to EC2 compute instances and associated storage used for some of the data tiering, other fees were for access charges along with excessive API calls. For example, some of the data was in storage classes that had fees for early retrieval or deletions, or fees for access among others.

How I use different AWS S3 storage classes (tiers)

  • Standard – Frequently changing data, or data with frequent access
  • Infrequent Access (IA) – Data that does not change frequently or that is not routinely accessed. In the past before OZA, I had placed data that did not need to be in standard, yet to warm for Glacier in this storage class. After the migrations, I have fewer data stored in IA, with more in OZA as well as some in Standard.
  • One Zone Availability (OZA) – Data that is frequently accessed for reading, however, is static, not yet cold enough to move to Glacier or deep archive. A mix of backups, online and active archives. Note that I use OZA as an additional copy or location and not as a single, lowest cost place to store data. In other words, anything that I put into OZA has at least one additional copy somewhere else which may not be in the cloud.
  • Glacier – Very cold, seldom accessed, archives

Where to learn more

Learn more about Clouds and Data Infrastructure related trends, tools, technologies and topics via the following links:

Additional learning experiences along with common questions (and answers), as well as tips can be found in Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials book.

Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials Book SDDC

What this all means

I decreased my AWS monthly bill by balancing things around, there was a one-month period where my costs increased during the changes, then a subsequent reduction. However, while I saw my monthly AWS storage invoices decrease, I’m also storing more data per month. How I saved money storing more data on aws s3 simple storage service involved using different storage classes.

Ok, nuff said, for now.

Cheers Gs

Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert 2010-2018. Author of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press), as well as Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio. Courteous comments are welcome for consideration. First published on https://storageioblog.com any reproduction in whole, in part, with changes to content, without source attribution under title or without permission is forbidden.

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