The only Glacier that will still exist in 10 years
January 17, 2019
The only Glacier that will still exist in 10 years
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Amazon Glacier
My organization is required to retain application audit logs for several years. The engineering team at my organization uses Amazon Glacier to provide a simple, inexpensive and compliant log storage. It is easy to configure the lifecycles for our log buckets in S3 to automatically transition objects to the infrequent-access storage class, and eventually to Glacier.
- Glacier is an inexpensive solution to the problem of storing rarely-accessed data for years.
- You can configure S3 buckets to transition objects to Glacier with a few clicks.
- It is easy to get started with Glacier; there is little learning curve and few concepts to familiarize yourself with.
- Accessing data stored in Glacier is slow. That shouldn't be a surprise, but it is undesirable nonetheless.
- Retrieving a large amount of data can be expensive; Glacier's intended use is as an archive of rarely-accessed data.
- Some users regard Glacier with fear and uncertainty. Slow retrieval time and high retrieval cost are the greatest risks of using Glacier, and they are also the Glacier interaction that most users have the least experience with.
- We seldom need to access our data in Glacier; this means that it is a fraction of the cost of S3, including the infrequent-access storage class.
- Transitioning data to Glacier is managed by AWS. We don't need our engineers to build or maintain log pipelines.
- Configuring lifecycle policies for S3 and Glacier is simple; it takes our engineers very little time, and there is little risk of errant configuration.