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S3 Storage Classes

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Trading retrieval speed and fee for storage cost, matched to how often data is actually accessed.

S3 Standard is the default, general-purpose class — millisecond access, no retrieval fee, highest per-GB storage cost, appropriate for frequently accessed data. S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (Standard-IA) and One Zone-IA offer the same millisecond access but a lower storage cost in exchange for a per-GB retrieval fee, appropriate for data accessed roughly monthly or less (e.g. backups you hope not to need); One Zone-IA is cheaper still but stores data in only one Availability Zone rather than the multi-AZ redundancy of every other class, appropriate only for easily-recreatable data.

S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval offers archive-level pricing with millisecond access for rarely-accessed data that still needs fast retrieval when accessed (e.g. medical images accessed rarely but needed instantly when they are). S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval and Glacier Deep Archive trade retrieval speed (minutes to many hours) for the lowest possible storage cost, suited to true long-term archives and compliance data that's essentially never read.

S3 Intelligent-Tiering automatically monitors access patterns per object and moves it between tiers (frequent, infrequent, and optionally archive tiers) without any manual lifecycle rule management, for a small monitoring fee — useful when access patterns are unpredictable or unknown in advance, removing the guesswork of manually choosing a class.

In the AWS Console

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    S3 → [your bucket] → Objects → select an object → Actions → Edit storage class

    Choose a storage class for that specific object, or set up a bucket-wide lifecycle rule instead for automatic transitions over time.

    Changing storage class on individual objects doesn't scale — for buckets with many objects, use Lifecycle rules (covered in S3 Advanced Features) instead.

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Key points

  • •Standard: frequent access, no retrieval fee, highest storage cost
  • •Standard-IA / One Zone-IA: infrequent access, retrieval fee, lower storage cost; One Zone trades redundancy for even lower cost
  • •Glacier Instant Retrieval: rare access but needs millisecond retrieval when accessed
  • •Glacier Flexible/Deep Archive: true long-term archives, minutes-to-hours retrieval, lowest cost
  • •Intelligent-Tiering: automatic tier movement based on actual observed access patterns