Reduce Amazon S3 Spend

AWS Simple Storage Service (S3) is one of the most popular AWS storage services. It is used for many use cases such as static websites, blogs, personal media storage, big data analytics, staging area for Redshift data, and enterprise backup storage. Because of its widespread usage, for most enterprises, AWS S3 spend one of the top five biggest cost drivers among all AWS services. For a deeper analysis of AWS and Azure cloud spending across market segments.

There are three primary costs associated with S3: storage cost charged per GB per month or hour, API cost for operation of files, and data transfer cost outside the AWS region. Despite these expenses, S3 buckets remain popular because they are a durable solution and offer a simple web interface to store and retrieve data. However, enterprises that use S3 buckets for content delivery can drive up their cloud spending quickly.

S3 costs depend on various attributes, and cloud users need to carefully analyze factors such as their associated services, instances, tags, etc., to curtail their AWS S3 spending.

If you’re a cloud operations admin or cloud engineer, you’re likely aware of the moving parts of S3 storage. For example, data read/write, or data moved in/out are considered as moving billable parts of S3 storage. This often means that AWS S3 expenses are influenced by a lot more than just the storage cost. A detailed analysis of all these factors can help you avoid the dreaded AWS S3 bill shock.

Making the most of AWS S3 buckets:

With AWS, you pay for the services you use and the storage units you’ve consumed. If AWS S3 service is a significant component of your AWS cost, implementing best practices for managing AWS S3 costs becomes critical.

Here are some easy-to-implement checks that can help you manage your AWS S3 costs:

1. Set the Right s3 Class for New Objects Before the Creation

Your first step is to analyze the access patterns for your data. Start thinking about the intended usage for each new object to be created in S3. Each object in S3 should have a specific access pattern. And therefore, there is an S3 class that works best for it. The right class should be applied to all new objects in Amazon S3. It’s not possible to define the default class per bucket in S3. But you can assign it per object.

Start defining the best class for each new object in S3. And set this class in the operation that uploads this object to Amazon S3. This can be done using AWS CLI, AWS Console, or AWS SDK. As a consequence, each new object will have the right class. This could be the best money-saving strategy in the long term. And probably the most time-efficient strategy.

2. Store your data in a compressed format:

While there is no charge for transferring data into an S3 bucket, there is a charge involved for data storage and requests like PUT, GET, LIST, etc. To avoid paying extra, it is essential to store your data in a compressed format.

3. Evenly distribute S3 objects:

If the S3 objects are distributed evenly into a virtual folder structure, the number of file operations needed to read these files will be less. This will lead to less spending as there is an additional cost for LIST and GET operations.

4. Use S3 for hosting static websites:

This helps to avoid EC2 costs and administrative overheads. S3 storage can scale up to millions of users without any manual intervention.

5. Appropriately tag buckets:

It is important to tag buckets appropriately so that you can prevent misuse of any S3 resources or easily identify if any data compromise occurs.

6. Monitor S3 buckets:

The S3 objects access patterns should be monitored and moved to appropriate storage classes. Different storage classes are priced differently therefore storing objects in the appropriate class can help reduce costs.

7. Enable the “Lifecycle” feature:

With versioning enabled on S3 buckets, it becomes easier to delete unused objects or older versions. With AWS Lifecycle Management, you can define time-based rules that can trigger ‘Transition’(moving objects to different storage class) and ‘Expiration’ (permanent deletion of objects). This ensures limiting your S3 costs by reducing S3 storage.

8. Expire S3 Objects

This is another strategy to remove unused objects. Amazon S3 Lifecycle Management can also set an expiration policy. This allows you to expire an object some days after creation. Every expired object will be automatically removed by AWS.

If you keep log files (or any other temporary data) as S3 objects, you should set an expiration for them. For example, you can set log objects to expire 30 days after creation. And they will be removed automatically.

9. Use Compressible Formats:

When using S3 for Big Data analytics, and staging Redshift data, try to use compressible formats like AVRON, PARQUET, and ORC, which will reduce the amount of S3 storage consumed.

12. Change Region

Some regions are much expensive than others. And this applies to Amazon S3 prices also. So it’s worth considering moving your S3 bucket to a region with lower prices.

Another factor to consider is data transfer costs between AWS regions. Data sent from a bucket to a VPC in the same region is free. But sending data to a VPC in another region will have a cost per Gb. It’s a good idea to keep a bucket in the region where data is sent.

Final Thoughts

Reducing S3 costs are often an afterthought for many organizations, partly due to the perception of S3 being a cheap storage medium. While it’s true that S3 expenses may not be as evident as other resources like Redshift of RDS, the footprint can grow over time. Lifecycle policies, partitioning, or batching similar data operations in groups can minimize that footprint.

In this article, you learned the most common strategies to reduce Amazon S3 costs. Now it’s time to take action. Pick the strategies that work best for your workload in AWS. And start implementing them.