Tips to easily optimize Amazon S3 cost

Amazon Web Services is the lead market in this Cloud Computing Business Thus this proves that their service is very efficient and reliable. AWS is used by many people who want to manage their backend, data and websites. Companies like Snapchat, Pinterest, Dropbox and many other companies are shifting their data to cloud computing so that they can focus more on their core functioning of their business.

The following are the tip to easily optimize Amazon S3 cost:-

1.    First understand and learn the uses of S3 are:-

You can store entire static website or images files for live serving on websites. Data storage can be stored for a long time in the Cloud data center and it is very cost effective.

2.    How S3 affects cost:-

In this you will understand how S3 can affect your cost.

a)    Pricing for the Retrieval:-

This will apply to your IA and Glacier storage. It will cost per GB for the data that has been retrieved.

b)    Cost of the Storage:-

You don’t have to pay a collective of an amount for the storage. But you have to pay for the storage that you have used. The cost fluctuates from one region to another but it is a fixed cost.

c)    Request Price:-

For per request, you will have to pay $0.005 in US and in Sao Paulo, it's $0.007 per 1000 request. So the pricing is different according to the region.

d)    Cost for Data Transfer:-

The cost may differ from region to region but if you are in AWS region then the cost will be zero.

3.    Central Role played by buckets:-

A)    Under your account, you can create a bucket where you store data in it or under it. There is no use of creating the file that you will be saving which at the end will be deleted.

B)    You can interact with S3 files in different ways:-

Deployment tools Chef and Ansible offers modules to operate S3 resources. You can also download and upload files instantly by logging in via the browser.

4.    First compress and zip your files where it’s necessary:-

It is better to zip your files so that you can save up your cost in storing the file and it is also easier to upload or download the file. You can not only save your cost in storage but also in transferring the file.

5.    There are four types of storage in S3 storage:-

Standard storage is the most expensive storage and it is designed for 99.99999999% durability and it is also cheapest and fastest for making changes in the data. Reduced Redundancy Storage is 20% cheaper than standard storage but in December 2016 price reduction in RRS was not applied so it is expensive or equal to the price of standard storage. Glacier is the most inexpensive storage in Amazon Web Services.

The files in the Glacier has 90 days storage period and the files that are deleted are charged on the remainder 90 days upon the deleted files.

6.    Understand how the cost is growing:-

When you constantly update your file then that may increase the storage cost. If you are generating data constantly then that also increase your storage cost.

7.    Is storing Older Version of your data your objective:-

The older version of the data which is not included in the list may get charged.

8.    Set your lifecycle policies of the data:-

There are policies that can optimize your S3 cost by setting policy to automatically delete your data if it is old than the days set. But you have to keep the data for some time because of the data retention laws and policies. You can convert your data from standard storage to Glacier which will save up your cost but if you are planning to delete the data then moving to the Glacier will be not a Good idea.

9.    First get a demo:-

Storing data without any consultation may or may not increase the cost of storage in S3. You can estimate to determine the right storage class for you with the size of your file, expected number of access, retention period and the waiting period. By ascertaining the details about your file and storage you can know the cost of each storage class.

10.     Cost depending type of the file:-

File storage up to 1 GB to 10 GB will cost you 2.3 cents to 40.5 cents for a monthly storage. But if the storage file is more than that then it can shoot up to $200 to $5000, therefore, zipping or compressing files can help in reducing the cost. Dropbox before moving the file to its own servers, the cost for 500 petabytes was coming up to 10.5 million per month. But after compressing the files and getting heavy discounts still the bill must be coming up to thousands of dollars in a month.

11.    Setting regions selection for optimizing the data:-

Data transfer cost can be optimized by using the best region location for a transferring data. For an example, if the user requests for a page then the nearest CDN edge location will check the updated copy if it is not found then it will fetch information from S3 and deliver it. This will increase the speed and higher availability of the information receiving and sending. Check if the data transfer cost is applicable for you and then according to that adjust your data center cost.

12.    Monitor your Billing payment of S3 cost:-

While checking your bill that you have been accrued from the S3 cost, you can get an entire split up of your bill where you can come to know which part of the area you getting billed the most.

Always keep a track of your data therefore always keep on measuring your data cost every month so that you can optimize your data. Don’t use S3 if you have to frequent write or reading of data because that may increase your cost very high.