3 announcements about Amazon S3 from re:Invent 2018: Intelligent-Tiering, Object Lock, and Batch Operations

On day 1 of re:Invent 2018, Amazon announced three additions to its Simple Storage Service (S3): Intelligent-Tiering, Object Lock, and Batch Operations. S3 Intelligent Tiering is introduced to automatically optimize storage costs based on data access patterns. S3 Object lock prevents the deletion or overwriting of an object for a specified amount of time. S3 Batch operations make managing billions of data easier with a single API request.

Amazon S3 or Simple Storage Service provides object storage through a web interface. It enables users to store and retrieve any amount of data safely and its easy-to-use management features help you easily organize your data. This service is being used in many use cases such as websites, mobile applications, backup and restore, archive, enterprise applications, IoT devices, and big data analytics.

Amazon S3 Intelligent Tiering for automatic cost optimization

Amazon S3 comes with different storage classes designed for different use cases. The storage classes supported by S3 are Standard, Standard-IA, One Zone-IA, and Glacier.  In addition to these, Amazon has added S3 Intelligent Tiering storage class, which is meant for automatically optimizing storage costs when data access patterns change. It consists of two tiers, namely, frequent access and infrequent access. It helps you cut the cost by monitoring your access patterns and moving the data that have not been accessed for consecutive 30 days to the infrequent tier. This object is moved back to the frequent access tier when accessed later.

Read the official announcement for more details on Intelligent-Tiering.

Amazon S3 Object Lock to prevent object version deletion for a customer-defined retention period

Amazon S3 Object Lock is a new feature to allow customers store objects using the write-once-read-many (WORM) model. With this feature, you will be able to prevent the object from being deleted or overwritten for a fixed amount of time or indefinitely. This feature is currently in preview and generally available in all AWS Regions and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.

S3 Object Lock comes with two mechanisms to manage object retention: retention periods and legal holds. A retention period is a fixed period of time during which your object will be WORM protected and can’t be deleted or overwritten. A legal hold is the same as the retention period but with no expiration date. An object version can have both a retention period and a legal hold.

Read the official announcement for more details on Object Lock.

Amazon S3 Batch Operations for object management

Amazon S3 Batch Operations makes managing billion of objects stored in Amazon S3 easier, with a single API request or a few clicks in the S3 Management Console. With this feature, you will be able to do things like copy objects between buckets, replace object tag sets, update access controls, restore objects from Amazon Glacier, and invoke AWS Lambda functions. This feature will be available in all AWS commercial and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.

Read the official announcement for more details on Batch Operations.

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