Amazon thinks the price is right. While many are going away from per GB pricing, Amazon apparently believes the real issue is finding the right level – in this case a paltry $0.01 per GB.
To make the service more attractive, there are new data retrieval policies meant to help you manage the cost of retrieval.
And through integration with AWS CloudTrail, customers can perform audit logging.
On the retrieval side, there are three payment tiers, as Amazon describes:
- “Free Tier Only – You can retrieve up to 5% of your stored data per month. Retrieval requests above the daily free tier allowance will not be accepted. You will not incur data retrieval costs while this option is in effect. This is the default value for all newly created AWS accounts.
- Max Retrieval Rate – You can cap the retrieval rate by specifying a gigabyte per hour limit in the AWS Management Console. With this setting, retrieval requests that would exceed the specified rate will not be accepted to ensure a data retrieval cost ceiling.
- No Retrieval Limit – You can choose to not set any data retrieval limits in which case all valid retrieval requests will be accepted. With this setting, your data retrieval cost will vary based on your usage. This is the default value for existing Amazon Glacier customers.”
This is not as simple as it sounds. “The options are chosen on a per-account, per-region basis and apply to all Glacier retrieval activities within the region. This is due to the fact that data retrieval costs vary by region and the free tier is also region-specific,” Amazon said.
The Audit Trail
For organizations that fall under compliance rules or just care about good IT practices, auditing is crucial. With the AWS CloudTrail support, all your API calls are tracked by the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). You can then use third party tools or the AWS Management Console to analyze them.
