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Glacier Costlier Than S3 for Small Files

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Re: Glacier Costlier Than S3 for Small Files

#4

The real question is why are people glaciering small files? Tar everything and send it up. And then do an incremental backup Amazon charges per operation, reduce the number of operations

My guess is they don't realise. AWS let's you setup lifecycle rules to archive S3 objects to Glacier automatically. It doesn't explicitly say it is cheaper (it says "this may reduce your costs"), but they probably just saw the headline prices for Glacier and moved everything.

Re: Glacier Costlier Than S3 for Small Files

#5
AWS is more honest with S3 Infrequent Access: https://aws.amazon.com/s3/storage-classes/

No additional metadata, but you get charged at least for 128 KB . Luckily lifecycle transition doesn't move files smaller than 128 KB. However, even using lifecycle transition you pay $0.01 per 1000 transitions. It doesn't seem much but for smaller items it can decrease savings a lot. E.g. if you average file is 6 MB, than you will loose 4 days of savings on S3 IA comparing to standard class.

Re: Glacier Costlier Than S3 for Small Files

#7

The real question is why are people glaciering small files? Tar everything and send it up. And then do an incremental backup Amazon charges per operation, reduce the number of operations

My guess is they don't realise. AWS let's you setup lifecycle rules to archive S3 objects to Glacier automatically. It doesn't explicitly say it is cheaper (it says "this may reduce your costs"), but they probably just saw the headline prices for Glacier and moved everything.

Also, I would guess a lot of Glacier users are probably just slotting it in place of some other system that doesn't have the same pricing model.

Re: Glacier Costlier Than S3 for Small Files

#10
This is one of the things I love about GCS Nearline, it really is a penny per byte and then the whole retrieval charges (which for my lazy rsync backup is never).

Disclaimer: I work at Google on Compute Engine, but not on GCS.

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