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2021-08-25 21:30:05

TL;DR: Amazon S3 offers a service named S3 Intelligent Tiering that has the potential to save you money by shifting S3 objects between various S3 storage classes on your behalf. However, there are accompanying fees and use-cases where this will actually cost you more money. This post helps break down the mechanics of how S3 Intelligent Tiering works in simple terms.

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) is one of the most popular services that AWS provides. AWS has made it dead simple for you to push files (which AWS refers to as objects) up to the cloud into namespaces (which AWS refers to as buckets) that allow you to pay for only what you use. Despite its popularity, S3 is one of the most complicated services from a pricing perspective as it charges you on a variety of dimensions including transit costs, the HTTP requests for accessing the service, as well as, the underlying storage utilized. This blog post covers the topic of S3 Intelligent Tiering which has potentially drastic cost saving implications for S3 storage in particular with the ability to save you over 50% depending on your objects’ access patterns.

Before diving into what S3 Intelligent Tiering is and how it works, you should be comfortable with understanding the concept that S3 offers various different storage types that can be set on a per-object basis. If you’re familiar with S3 storage classes you can skip to the next section.