Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) | Storage Management

Question 1

Is there an additional charge for hosting static websites on Amazon S3?

Storage Management

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) | Storage

Answer 1

There is no additional charge for hosting static websites on Amazon S3. The same pricing dimensions of storage, requests, and data transfer apply to your website objects.

Refer to the S3 Pricing page for more information.

S3 Object Tagging

Question 2

What are S3 Object Tags?

Storage Management

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) | Storage

Answer 2

S3 Object Tags are key-value pairs applied to S3 objects which can be created, updated or deleted at any time during the lifetime of the object. With these, you’ll have the ability to create Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies, setup S3 Lifecycle policies, and customize storage metrics. These object-level tags can then manage transitions between storage classes and expire objects in the background.

Question 3

How do I apply Object Tags to my objects?

Storage Management

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) | Storage

Answer 3

You can add tags to new objects when you upload them or you can add them to existing objects. Up to ten tags can be added to each S3 object and you can use either the AWS Management Console, the REST API, the AWS CLI, or the AWS SDKs to add object tags.

Question 4

Why should I use Object Tags?

Storage Management

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) | Storage

Answer 4

Object Tags are a new tool you can use to enable simple management of your S3 storage. With the ability to create, update, and delete tags at any time during the lifetime of your object, your storage can adapt to the needs of your business. These tags allow you to control access to objects tagged with specific key-value pairs, allowing you to further secure confidential data for only a select group or user. Object tags can also be used to label objects that belong to a specific project or business unit, which could be used in conjunction with lifecycle policies to manage transitions to the S3 Standard – Infrequent Access and Glacier storage tiers.

Question 5

How can I update the Object Tags on my objects?

Storage Management

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) | Storage

Answer 5

Object Tags can be changed at any time during the lifetime of your S3 object, you can use either the AWS Management Console, the REST API, the AWS CLI, or the AWS SDKs to change your object tags. Note that all changes to tags outside of the AWS Management Console are made to the full tag set. If you have five tags attached to a particular object and want to add a sixth, you need to include the original five tags in that request.

Question 6

Will my Object Tags be replicated if I use Cross-Region Replication?

Storage Management

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) | Storage

Answer 6

Object Tags can be replicated across regions using Cross-Region Replication. For more information about setting up Cross-Region Replication, please visit How to Set Up Cross-Region Replication in the Amazon S3 Developer Guide.

For customers with Cross-Region Replication already enabled, new permissions are required in order for tags to replicate. For more information on the policies required, please visit How to Set Up Cross-Region Replication in the Amazon S3 Developer Guide.

Question 7

How much do Object Tags cost?

Storage Management

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) | Storage

Answer 7

Object Tags are priced at $0.01 per 10,000 tags per month. The requests associated with adding and updating Object Tags are priced the same as existing request prices, please see the Amazon S3 pricing page for more information.

S3 Analytics - Storage Class Analysis

Question 8

What is S3 Analytics – Storage Class Analysis?

Storage Management

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) | Storage

Answer 8

With storage class analysis, you can analyze storage access patterns and transition the right data to the right storage class. This new S3 Analytics feature automatically identifies infrequent access patterns to help you transition storage to Standard-IA. You can configure a storage class analysis policy to monitor an entire bucket, a prefix, or object tag. Once an infrequent access pattern is observed, you can easily create a new lifecycle age policy based on the results. Storage class analysis also provides daily visualizations of your storage usage on the AWS Management Console that you can export to a S3 bucket to analyze using business intelligence tools of your choice such as Amazon QuickSight.

Question 9

How do I get started with S3 Analytics – Storage Class Analysis?

Storage Management

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) | Storage

Answer 9

You can use the AWS Management Console or the S3 PUT Bucket Analytics API to configure a Storage Class Analysis policy to identify infrequently accessed storage that can be transitioned to Standard-IA or archived to Glacier. You can navigate to the “Management” tab in the S3 Console to manage S3 Analytics, S3 Inventory, and S3 CloudWatch metrics.

Question 10

How am I charged for using S3 Analytics – Storage Class Analysis?

Storage Management

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) | Storage

Answer 10

Please see the Amazon S3 pricing page for general information about S3 Analytics – Storage Class Analysis pricing.

Question 11

How often is the Storage Class Analysis updated?

Storage Management

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) | Storage

Answer 11

Storage Class Analysis is updated on a daily basis on the S3 Management Console. Additionally, you can configure S3 Analytics to export your daily storage class analysis to a S3 bucket of your choice.

S3 Inventory

Question 12

What is S3 Inventory?

Storage Management

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) | Storage

Answer 12

S3 Inventory provides a scheduled alternative to Amazon S3’s synchronous List API. You can configure S3 Inventory to provide a CSV or ORC file output of your objects and their corresponding metadata on a daily or weekly basis for an S3 bucket or prefix. You can simplify and speed up business workflows and big data jobs with S3 Inventory. You can use S3 inventory to verify encryption and replication status of your objects to meet business, compliance, and regulatory needs.

Question 13

How do I get started with S3 Inventory?

Storage Management

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) | Storage

Answer 13

You can use the AWS Management Console or the PUT Bucket Inventory API to configure a daily or weekly inventory for all the objects within your S3 bucket or a subset of the objects under a shared prefix. As part of the configuration you can specify a destination S3 bucket for your inventory, the output file format (CSV or ORC), and specific object metadata necessary for your business application, such as object name, size, last modified date, storage class, version ID, delete marker, noncurrent version flag, multipart upload flag, replication status, or encryption status.

Question 14

Can files written by S3 Inventory be encrypted?

Storage Management

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) | Storage

Answer 14

Yes, you can configure to encrypt all files written by S3 inventory to be encrypted by SSE-S3 or SSE-KMS. For more information, refer to the user guide.

Question 15

How do I use S3 Inventory?

Storage Management

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) | Storage

Answer 15

You can use S3 Inventory as a direct input into your application workflows or big data jobs. You can also query S3 Inventory using Standard SQL language with Amazon Athena, Amazon Redshift Spectrum, and other tools such as Presto, Hive, and Spark. Learn more about querying Inventory with Athena.

Question 16

How am I charged for using S3 Inventory?

Storage Management

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) | Storage

Answer 16

Please see the Amazon S3 pricing page for S3 Inventory pricing. Once you configure encryption using SSE-KMS, you will incur KMS charges for encryption, refer to KMS pricing page for detail.

S3 CloudWatch Metrics

Question 17

How do I get started with S3 CloudWatch Metrics?

Storage Management

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) | Storage

Answer 17

You can use the AWS Management Console to enable the generation of 1-minute CloudWatch metrics for your S3 bucket or configure filters for the metrics using a prefix or object tag. Alternately, you can call the S3 PUT Bucket Metrics API to enable and configure publication of S3 storage metrics. Storage metrics will be available in CloudWatch within 15 minutes of being enabled.

Question 18

Can I align storage metrics to my applications or business organizations?

Storage Management

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) | Storage

Answer 18

Yes, you can configure S3 CloudWatch metrics to generate metrics for your S3 bucket or configure filters for the metrics using a prefix or object tag. For example, you can monitor a spark application that accesses data under the prefix “/Bucket01/BigData/SparkCluster” as metrics filter 1 and define a second metrics filter with the tag “Dept, 1234” as metrics filter 2. An object can be a member of multiple filters, e.g., an object within the prefix “/Bucket01/BigData/SparkCluster” and with the tag “Dept,1234” will be in both metrics filter 1 and 2. In this way, metrics filters can be aligned to business applications, team structures or organizational budgets, allowing you to monitor and alert on multiple workloads separately within the same S3 bucket.

Question 19

What alarms can I set on my storage metrics?

Storage Management

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) | Storage

Answer 19

You can use CloudWatch to set thresholds on any of the storage metrics counts, timers, or rates and fire an action when the threshold is breached. For example, you can set a threshold on the percentage of 4xx Error Responses and when at least 3 data points are above the threshold fire a CloudWatch alarm to alert a Dev Ops engineer.

Question 20

How am I charged for using S3 CloudWatch Metrics?

Storage Management

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) | Storage

Answer 20

S3 CloudWatch Metrics are priced as custom metrics for Amazon CloudWatch. Please see Amazon CloudWatch pricing page for general information about S3 CloudWatch metrics pricing.

Lifecycle Management Policies

Question 21

What is Lifecycle Management?

Storage Management

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) | Storage

Answer 21

S3 Lifecycle management provides the ability to define the lifecycle of your object with a predefined policy and reduce your cost of storage. You can set lifecycle transition policy to automatically migrate Amazon S3 objects to Standard - Infrequent Access (Standard - IA) and/or Amazon Glacier based on the age of the data. You can also set lifecycle expiration policies to automatically remove objects based on the age of the object. You can set a policy for multipart upload expiration, which expires incomplete multipart upload based on the age of the upload.

Question 22

How do I set up a lifecycle management policy?

Storage Management

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) | Storage

Answer 22

You can set up and manage lifecycle policies in the AWS Management Console, S3 REST API, AWS SDKs, or AWS Command Line Interface (CLI). You can specify the policy at the prefix or at the bucket level.

Question 23

How much does it cost to use lifecycle management?

Storage Management

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) | Storage

Answer 23

There is no additional cost to set up and apply lifecycle policies. A transition request is charged per object when an object becomes eligible for transition according to the lifecycle rule. Refer to the S3 Pricing page for pricing information.

Question 24

What can I do with Lifecycle Management Policies?

Storage Management

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) | Storage

Answer 24

As data matures, it can become less critical, less valuable and/or subject to compliance requirements. Amazon S3 includes an extensive library of policies that help you automate data migration processes. For example, you can set infrequently accessed objects to move into lower cost storage tier (like Standard-Infrequent Access) after a period of time. After another period, it can be moved into Amazon Glacier for archive and compliance, and eventually deleted. These rules can invisibly lower storage costs and simplify management efforts, and may be leveraged across the Amazon family of storage services. These policies also include good stewardship practices to remove objects and attributes that are no longer needed to manage cost and optimize performance.

Question 25

How can I use Amazon S3’s lifecycle policy to help lower my Amazon S3 storage costs?

Storage Management

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) | Storage

Answer 25

With Amazon S3’s lifecycle policies, you can configure your objects to be migrated to Standard - Infrequent Access (Standard - IA), archived to Amazon Glacier, or deleted after a specific period of time. You can use this policy-driven automation to quickly and easily reduce storage costs as well as save time. In each rule you can specify a prefix, a time period, a transition to Standard - IA or Amazon Glacier, and/or an expiration. For example, you could create a rule that archives into Amazon Glacier all objects with the common prefix “logs/” 30 days from creation, and expires these objects after 365 days from creation. You can also create a separate rule that only expires all objects with the prefix “backups/” 90 days from creation. Lifecycle policies apply to both existing and new S3 objects, helping you optimize storage and maximize cost savings for all current data and any new data placed in S3 without time-consuming manual data review and migration. Within a lifecycle rule, the prefix field identifies the objects subject to the rule. To apply the rule to an individual object, specify the key name. To apply the rule to a set of objects, specify their common prefix (e.g. “logs/”). You can specify a transition action to have your objects archived and an expiration action to have your objects removed. For time period, provide the creation date (e.g. January 31, 2015) or the number of days from creation date (e.g. 30 days) after which you want your objects to be archived or removed. You may create multiple rules for different prefixes.

Learn more.

Question 26

How can I configure my objects to be deleted after a specific time period?

Storage Management

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) | Storage

Answer 26

You can set a lifecycle expiration policy to remove objects from your buckets after a specified number of days. You can define the expiration rules for a set of objects in your bucket through the Lifecycle Configuration policy that you apply to the bucket. Each Object Expiration rule allows you to specify a prefix and an expiration period. The prefix field identifies the objects subject to the rule. To apply the rule to an individual object, specify the key name. To apply the rule to a set of objects, specify their common prefix (e.g. “logs/”). For expiration period, provide the number of days from creation date (i.e. age) after which you want your objects removed. You may create multiple rules for different prefixes. For example, you could create a rule that removes all objects with the prefix “logs/” 30 days from creation, and a separate rule that removes all objects with the prefix “backups/” 90 days from creation.

After an Object Expiration rule is added, the rule is applied to objects that already exist in the bucket as well as new objects added to the bucket. Once objects are past their expiration date, they are identified and queued for removal. You will not be billed for storage for objects on or after their expiration date, though you may still be able to access those objects while they are in queue before they are removed. As with standard delete requests, Amazon S3 doesn’t charge you for removing objects using Object Expiration. You can set Expiration rules for your versioning-enabled or versioning-suspended buckets as well.

Learn more.