High Data Retrieval Costs for S3 Glacier Storage

This insight identifies when data retrieval costs for an S3 bucket are occurring on a S3 Glacier storage tier. Data retrieval costs may indicate frequently accessed data that could be optimized by moving to a more cost-effective storage class.

AWS charges for storing objects in your S3 buckets, and for certain tiers, data retrieval per gigabyte. Amazon S3 provides the following S3 Glacier storage classes:

S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval (GLACIER_IR) – Use for long-term data that's rarely accessed and requires milliseconds retrieval. Data in this storage class is available for real-time access.
S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval (GLACIER) – Use for archives where portions of the data might need to be retrieved in minutes. Data in this storage class is archived, and not available for real-time access.
S3 Glacier Deep Archive (DEEP_ARCHIVE) – Use for archiving data that rarely needs to be accessed. Data in this storage class is archived, and not available for real-time access.

While S3 buckets stored on these tiers have lower storage costs, there is a cost for retrieving data. Consider the following few ways to address.

Look at these buckets to determine why data retrieval is needed and consider moving frequently accessed data to the Standard storage tier, which does not charge for data retrieval.

Some Items to Note:

A small fee is applied for objects transitioned between storage classes, which is usually very low. Learn more about S3 pricing and the additional costs associated with S3 here.
Learn more about how to change the storage class for existing objects here.

Source: CloudZero

The information for this insight is based on spend data in the CloudZero platform.

Frequency

This insight is checked once per day. If the insight is marked as Ignored, it will still get updated, but notifications will no longer be sent for any updates.

Threshold

This insight is created if data retrieval costs for data stored in long-term or archival storage on any S3 bucket exceeds $100 over the last 30 days. When the cost impact from all S3 buckets drops back to $100 or below, the insight will resolve.