Difference:
Glacier vs. Amazon S3
Amazon Glacier provides durable storage for any type of data format that will be accessed in three to five hours. A developer could use Amazon Glacier in conjunction with storage lifecycle management, rotating rarely used data to cold storage to save money. Glacier differs from Amazon's more expensive Simple Storage Service (S3) in that S3 is designed for data that needs to be retrieved in real-time.
An enterprise turns to Amazon S3 for object storage with low latency. S3 is a better fit than AWS' Glacier storage for an enterprise that requires regular or immediate access to data.
- Amazon S3 is a durable, secure, simple, and fast storage service, while Amazon S3 Glacier is used for archiving solutions.
- Use S3 if you need low latency or frequent access to your data. Use S3 Glacier for low storage cost, and you do not require millisecond access to your data.
- You have three retrieval options when it comes to Glacier, each varying in the cost and speed it retrieves an object for you. You retrieve data in milliseconds from S3.
- The S3 and Glacier are designed for durability of 99.999999999% of objects across multiple Availability Zones.
- S3 is designed for availability of 99.99% while Glacier has no percentage provided by AWS.
- S3 can be used to host static web content, while Glacier cannot.
- S3 supports Versioning.
- You can configure a lifecycle policy for your S3 objects to automatically transfer them to Glacier. You can also upload objects directly to either S3 or Glacier.
- You can transition objects from some S3 storage classes to another. Glacier objects cannot be transitioned to any S3 storage class.
Reason Why User Should Choose Amazon Glacier?
If you’re looking for low latency data storage and require frequent access to your data, Amazon Glacier is not for you. After all, that’s what S3 is for. If, however, you are looking for something more along the lines of archival file storage, then the price and flexibility offered by Glacier is definitely worth exploring.
Glacier can also be used as part of your disaster recovery and backup process. We’ve already established that it takes hours to retrieve data stored by the service, so S3 is still a better choice for storing recent Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) or Snapshots. However, Amazon Glacier can easily be incorporated into the S3 lifecycle and used to indefinitely store data that would normally be deleted due to cost concerns.
To save on storage costs, AWS users typically schedule older backup data that is stored on S3 to be deleted after a certain period of time. This money-saving technique is simplified even further by utilizing a third-party service like CloudRanger to automate the process. But by also incorporating Amazon Glacier into the process, relevant data that would normally get erased can instead be transferred to cold-storage. While saving this data indefinitely on S3 makes little financial sense, the cost of saving it with Glacier is much more palatable, giving users the best of both worlds.
Uses of AWS Glacier
- Digital Storage.
- Scientific Data Storage.
- Healthcare information Archiving.
- Regulatory and Compliance Archiving.
- Magnetic Tape Replacement.
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