AWS Glacier Overview

Glacier is a secure, durable, and extremely low-cost cloud storage service for data archiving and long-term backup. Customers can reliably store large or small amounts of data for as little as $0.004 per gigabyte per month.

Glacier Data Retrieval Process

1. To retrieve Amazon S3 data stored in Amazon Glacier, initiate a retrieval request using the Amazon S3 APIs or the Amazon S3 Management Console.

2. The retrieval request creates a temporary copy of your data in RRS while leaving the archived data intact in Amazon Glacier. You can also specify the amount of time in days for which the temporary copy is stored in RRS.

3. You can then access your temporary copy from RRS through an Amazon S3 GET request on the archived object.

Glacier Pricing

• $0.004 per gigabyte per month.

• Lifecycle transition requests into Glacier cost $0.05 per 1,000 requests.

• Objects that are archived to Glacier have a minimum of 90 days of storage. Objects deleted before 90 days incur a pro-rated early deletion fee charge based on remaining period. If you delete 1 GB after 2 months, you will be charged for 1 month of Glacier storage. Object deletion after 90 days is free.

• Retrieval Fee: 

  • Expedited retrievals costs start at $0.03 per GB and $0.01 per request. Standard retrievals costs start at $0.01 per GB and $0.05 per 1,000 requests. Bulk retrievals costs start at $0.0025 per GB and $0.025 per 1,000 requests.

  • You can retrieve 10 GB of your Amazon Glacier data per month for free. The free tier allowance can be used at any time during the month and applies to Standard retrievals. 

Glacier Retrieval Pricing Options

Amazon Glacier provides three options for access to archives, from a few minutes to several hours:

1. Expedited

   1. Allow you to quickly access your data when occasional urgent requests for a subset of archives are required.

   2. For all but the largest archives (250 MB+), data accessed using Expedited retrievals are typically made available within 1–5 minutes.

   3. There are two types of Expedited retrievals:

      1. On-Demand requests are similar to EC2 On-Demand instances and are available most of the time.

      2. Provisioned requests are guaranteed to be available when you need them. 

   4. Note: Don't have to specify On-Demand or Provisioned each time. If you have purchased provisioned capacity, then all expedited retrievals are automatically served through your provisioned capacity.

2. Standard

   1. Allow you to access any of your archives within several hours.

   2. Standard retrievals typically complete within 3–5 hours. This is the default option.

3. Bulk

   1. Bulk retrievals are Amazon Glacier’s lowest-cost retrieval option, which you can use to retrieve large amounts, even petabytes, of data inexpensively in a day.

   2. Bulk retrievals typically complete within 5–12 hours.

Important Notes (Exam Tips)

1. Glacier may not be available in all regions.

   • You can use the region drop down to check for available regions from Glacier dashboard.

2. To set the retrieval, you need to set the Tier parameter in the Initiate Job (POST jobs) REST API request, or the equivalent in the AWS CLI or AWS SDKs.