Amazon Simple Storage Service, better known as AWS S3, is one of the oldest and most widely-used solutions from Amazon Web Services. S3 is designed to store terabytes of customer data with high availability and scale. Prior to AWS S3 Intelligent Tiering, Amazon Cloud users had access to four storage class options:
- Standard – Designed for frequently accessed data.
- Standard-IA – Designed for long-lived, infrequently accessed data.
- One Zone-IA – Designed for long-lived, infrequently accessed, non-critical data.
- Glacier – Designed for long-lived, infrequent accessed, archived critical data.
The issue here is that access patterns can be different for the different objects. Though customers could build lifecycle policies to move the objects across storage classes, it was challenging to predefine the most appropriate storage class(s) because of the unpredictable nature of application adoption and usage. Even in scenarios where access frequency is known, customers may forget to make the proper class adjustments to optimize their budget.
