Policy del ciclo di vita S3 e classi di storage

Not all data is accessed equally. Recent uploads may be read constantly, while year-old logs are rarely touched.

S3 storage classes let you match storage cost to access frequency.

S3 Standard is the default: high durability, low latency, frequent access. It is the most expensive per GB but cheapest per request.

Great for active, hot data.

Standard-IA and One Zone-IA cost less per GB but charge a retrieval fee. Use them for data accessed monthly, not daily.

• Standard-IA spans multiple AZs
• One Zone-IA is cheaper but single-AZ

S3 Intelligent-Tiering automatically moves objects between access tiers based on usage patterns, for a small monitoring fee. Perfect when access patterns are unpredictable.

For archives you rarely read:

• Glacier Instant Retrieval — milliseconds, cheap storage
• Glacier Flexible Retrieval — minutes to hours
• Glacier Deep Archive — cheapest, hours to retrieve

A lifecycle policy is a set of rules that automatically transition objects to cheaper classes or delete them after a set age, with zero manual work.

This rule moves objects to Standard-IA after 30 days, to Glacier after 90, and deletes them after 365 days.

Attach the lifecycle configuration to a bucket via the CLI.

Rules can target a subset of objects using a prefix (like logs/) or object tags, so different data types get different lifecycles.

In versioned buckets, lifecycle rules can also expire old non-current versions and clean up incomplete multipart uploads, preventing silent cost growth.

Quick guide:

• Daily access → Standard
• Unknown pattern → Intelligent-Tiering
• Monthly access → Standard-IA
• Rare archive → Glacier tiers

Test your storage knowledge.

You learned S3 cost optimization:

• Storage classes match cost to access frequency
• Intelligent-Tiering auto-optimizes unknown patterns
• Glacier tiers archive cold data cheaply
• Lifecycle policies automate transitions and deletion

Set it once and S3 quietly lowers your bill over time.