Interestingly they penalise you for short-term 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…
After reading tezza's explanation [1] of how they're probably using tape storage, this makes sense; Amazon wants the mechanical robot arm to spend the majority of its time writing to the tapes. If you're constantly tying it up with writes/deletes, you're taking time away from its primary mission: to archive your data. Charging you for early deletes discourages that practice. [1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44…
There are any number of reasons why deletes would be discouraged. One is packing: if your objects are "tarred" together in a compiled object, discouraging early deletes makes it more cost-effective to optimistically pack early.