I manage an AWS S3 bucket that holds around 100 million objects, with an average size of about 250 KB each. It's costing my organization over $500 a month to store these, and most of the files are quite old and barely accessed. As someone who's fairly new to AWS S3, I'm looking for the best strategies to reduce these costs.
I've thought about a few options:
1. **Intelligent Tiering** would lead to high monitoring costs, possibly an extra $250 monthly just for monitoring.
2. **Lifecycle Policies** seem to have expensive transition fees—my rough estimates suggest it could cost around $1,000 to transition all objects.
3. **Manual Transition via CLI** might not save much since it incurs similar request fees to the lifecycle approach.
4. I considered **aggregating files** by zipping them, but that doesn't seem feasible for my org.
5. **Deleting older objects** is on the table, but I'd like to avoid that unless absolutely necessary.
Any advice or suggestions on how to move forward would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!
5 Answers
Implementing tiering could increase costs due to complexity and performance variances. Your current monthly costs don’t seem excessive, and while you might save a bit with lifecycle rules, you should weigh whether the complexity is worth the savings of potentially $100 to $200 per month.
Honestly, spending $500 a month isn't that bad for a business. If you manage to cut it down by half, you'll save $250 a month, which isn't even the salary of a skilled software engineer. Do you really think it’s worth the effort, unless you expect significant growth in your object count?
We use these lifecycle rules: Transition to Infrequent Access after 30 days since last access, then archive after 180 days, and go back to Standard on first access. The initial fees will pay off in the long run. This method has worked well for us!
Check your usage patterns—if older objects are less likely to be accessed, set up a lifecycle policy. Move objects older than 90 days to Infrequent Access and after a couple of months, archive them to Glacier. This can significantly lower your costs without hurting access speed. Creating ZIPs for extremely old files could be overkill given the current spending!
I recommend combining lifecycle policies with a transition to Infrequent Access after 30 days, then archiving older data after 360 days, and finally expiry after 720 days. Yes, the fees can be high, but in the long run, this approach requires less maintenance. However, if you know for sure some data isn’t needed anymore, cleaning that up first is a smart move!
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