How To Optimize Amazon S3 Storage Costs

Introduction

Amazon S3 is known for being affordable and flexible within the AWS platform. However, its complex pricing can be tricky to understand. This article aims to simplify Amazon S3 pricing to help you reduce storage costs effectively. We will explore various elements of S3 costs, highlight key factors to consider, and include a couple of tips to reduce costs.

Understanding Amazon S3 Pricing

To effectively manage your expenses with AWS S3, it's important to grasp its pricing structure. Here, we'll briefly touch on the key components of S3 pricing:

Storage Costs: You're charged based on the size of the data stored in your S3 buckets. and storage class The cost varies by region, storage volume, and the storage tier chosen for your data. For example, storing data in the S3 Standard tier generally costs about $0.023 to $0.027 per gigabyte.

Object Requests: Costs are incurred for operations like PUT, COPY, POST, LIST, GET, and SELECT on your S3 objects. For S3 Standard, operations such as write and list are approximately $0.005 per 1,000 requests. Read operations like GET and SELECT are cheaper, roughly a tenth the cost of write operations. It's important to note that these costs can vary depending on the region.

Data Transfer: Charges apply for outgoing data transfer from S3, while incoming data (ingress) is free. Data transfer within the same region or to other AWS services in the same region is also free. Typically, outbound data transfer costs about $0.09 per gigabyte for the first 10 terabytes each month.

Additional Costs: You might also encounter costs related to management features, data insights, replication, and transformations within S3

For an in-depth cost breakdown, check out our blog, The Ultimate Guide to Amazon S3 Pricing: Understanding Your Storage Costs

How to Lower Your Amazon S3 Costs

Here are some tips and tricks to help you keep track of S3 costs and find simple ways to reduce your AWS S3 bill:

Enhance Savings with Amazon S3 Intelligent Tiering

Amazon S3 Intelligent Tiering acts like a smart assistant for your data management, automating the process of saving on S3 storage costs. AWS offers this service for a minimal monitoring and automation fee. It continuously monitors your data access patterns and moves objects between storage tiers to cut costs—ideal for unpredictable usage patterns.

Here's how it works: It starts by storing your data in the Frequent Access tier. If the data isn't accessed for 30 consecutive days, it automatically moves to the Infrequent Access tier. If there continues to be no access for 90 days, the data is then transitioned to the “Archive Instant Access” tier. Moreover, data that isn’t accessed often gets moved to cheaper, infrequent access tiers. If this data is accessed later, it's automatically shifted back to the more accessible frequent access tier, ensuring you always get the best performance for your money.

Key considerations:

• Objects smaller than 128 KB: These are not monitored by this service and will always be billed at the Frequent Access tier rates.

Cost breakdown:

• Storage Costs: These vary depending on the tier your data is currently stored in.
• Monitoring Costs: There is a modest monthly monitoring fee of $0.0025 per 1,000 objects, applicable only for objects larger than 128 KB.
• Request Costs: Request costs in S3 Intelligent-Tiering are equivalent to those in the S3 Standard tier, making it a cost-effective option if request fees are a concern.

In summary, S3 Intelligent-Tiering simplifies cost management and is an excellent strategy for environments where data usage is hard to predict. It automates the selection of storage tiers, ensuring you always receive the best value from your AWS storage investments.

Remove Incomplete Amazon S3 Multipart Uploads

Amazon S3's multipart upload feature is great for uploading large files (over 100 MB) in smaller parts. This method helps speed up uploads and keeps them going smoothly even if there's a network issue. However, if your upload gets interrupted or isn't completed, S3 keeps these parts as 'incomplete MPUs', and you get charged for storing them.

To address issues with incomplete multipart uploads, Storage Lens is a practical tool. It features both Free and Advanced Tiers, with the Free Tier being enough for tracking incomplete multipart uploads. Implement a bucket lifecycle policy to avoid storage charges for incomplete MPUs in specific buckets. Detailed instructions  are available in the following documentation "Configuring a bucket lifecycle configuration to delete incomplete multipart uploads.

For easily finding the necessary metrics and navigating through the Storage Lens dashboard, you can refer to the following AWS blog for more in-depth guidance:

Reduce Storage Costs by Compressing Data Before Upload

Amazon S3 charges you based on the amount of data you store and the amount you transfer out of the service. By compressing your data before sending it to S3, you can significantly reduce both storage and data transfer costs. Employing a fast compression method like LZ4 not only enhances performance but also lowers storage requirements and AWS S3 costs.

Use Amazon S3 Cross-Region Replication (CRR)

If you often move data between Amazon S3 buckets located in different regions, consider utilizing the cross-region replication feature to replicate your S3 bucket to another region. This strategy not only boosts performance but also reduces costs associated with data transfers and S3 storage.

Take, for instance, transferring 20 GB from a bucket in us-west-2 to an EC2 instance in us-east-1, which typically incurs a charge of $0.20. If you replicate the data to a secondary S3 bucket in us-east-1 beforehand, your costs would drop to just $0.02 for the transfer and $0.03 for storage monthly, offering a considerable cost advantage.

Reduce Amazon S3 Costs with Lifecycle Rules

Setting up a lifecycle rule in Amazon S3 allows you to automate the movement of files to different storage tiers or to delete them based on their age. You can specify which files the rule should apply to by using tags or file prefixes, or you can apply it to an entire bucket.

To begin, open the S3 console and select one of your buckets. Click on the Management tab, where you’ll find the Lifecycle rules section. Here, click on Create lifecycle rule.

For instance, consider a scenario similar to the one mentioned earlier, where no files older than thirty days are accessed. You could set up a lifecycle rule that:

• Moves files to the Standard-IA (Infrequent Access) tier after 30 days.
• Transfers files to Glacier Instant Retrieval after they have been stored for 105 days.

In the S3 console, your setup for this access rule would appear under the section for transitioning current versions.

A note of caution: Be careful when configuring lifecycle policies. Moving files between different storage classes, especially to and from Glacier, can significantly increase costs. Even small errors in setting up these policies can lead to substantial unexpected charges on your AWS bill!

Here are the prices per 1,000 Lifecycle Transition requests for various S3 storage classes in the us-east-1 (N. Virginia) region:

• S3 Intelligent-Tiering $0.01
• S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access $0.01
• S3 Standard-Infrequent Access $0.01
• S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval  $0.02
• S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval  $0.03
• S3 Glacier Deep Archive $0.05

As demonstrated, the highest costs are associated with the Glacier storage classes.

Easily Monitor Your Buckets with Cloudchipr

With Cloudchipr, you can easily find and monitor all your buckets using a wide range of filters, eliminating the need for creating custom monitoring solutions to keep track.

Our Automations feature, specifically the 'Workflows' component, allows you to configure notifications about S3 buckets. You can utilize this to alert team members via Email, Slack, or webhooks about unused buckets, as demonstrated below with our Slack integration

Understanding Amazon S3 pricing can be challenging, but with the right strategies and tools, you can save a lot of money. By knowing the pricing details, using features like S3 Intelligent Tiering, and applying practices like removing incomplete uploads, compressing data, and setting up lifecycle policies, you can manage your storage costs more effectively.

Additionally, using Cloudchipr, you can further enhance your ability to monitor and manage your AWS resources. Cloudchipr provides detailed insights and automation tools that help you track, visualize, and control your storage usage across multiple AWS accounts.