Amazon Glacier : Low Cost Storage Service for Archival Purpose

Amazon Glacier is a Low Cost Storage Service for Archival Purpose newly has been introduced by Amazon and pricing is on Pay as You Go model like the others. Amazon Glacier is for mass data storage with low configuration hardware behind and is not intended for serving files using GET request, unlike CDN. Amazon Glacier is probably more better if you have very volume of storage need as a backup service.

What is Amazon Glacier ?

Amazon Glacier is designed with the expectation that retrievals are infrequent and unusual, and data will be stored for extended periods of time. This is officially written by Amazon. Retrieval up to 5% of data stored in Amazon Glacier goes for free each month. With $0.01 per gigabyte per month charge, Amazon Glacier saves the files as single or multiple archives. So unlike other backup services, it is not possible to use it for multiple purposes which is frequently done by the users. Amazon is using 256-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES-256) for encryption of the stored data.

Practical Usability of Amazon Glacier

Amazon Glacier is actually not suitable for an average computer user. It is intended for small business to enterprise and Governmental data storage who basically seeks an encrypted data storage service for higher volume of data. The individual archival limit of a maximum size of 40 terabytes and 1,000 vaults per account simply explains it is designed in a different way. Amazon Glacier has support for API and SDK. Data retrieval system is dependent on REST API and should be setup as a job. Vaults are mean-ed for organization of data and archive is stored in a vault. Currently, Amazon Glacier is offering 5 regions for data storage, 3 are in US (North Virginia, Northern California and Oregon) 1 in European region (Ireland) and the last one in Asia Pacific (Tokyo).