No more Amazon Glacier, it's going to S3.
Posted by gmerideth@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 36 comments
It looks like Glacier is going away but adding new classes to S3 like S3 Glacier Deep.
Hello, After careful consideration, we have decided to stop accepting new customers for Amazon Glacier (original standalone vault-based service) starting on December 15, 2025. There will be no change to the S3 Glacier storage classes as part of this plan.
For customers seeking enhanced archival capabilities or lower costs, we recommend the S3 Glacier storage classes [1] because they deliver the highest performance, most retrieval flexibility, and lowest cost archive storage in the cloud. S3 Glacier storage classes provide a superior customer experience with S3 bucket-based APIs, full AWS Region availability, lower costs, and AWS service integration. You can choose from three optimized storage classes: S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval for immediate access, S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval for backup and disaster recovery, and S3 Glacier Deep Archive for long-term compliance archives.
SuperScott500@reddit
Who is still using Amazon and why?
CollegeDeployer@reddit
And now AWS is about to get more expensive.
Oh boy, I can not wait to go back on-prem
BrainWaveCC@reddit
On prem storage is not coming back en mass, I'm sorry to inform you.
jibbits61@reddit
I’m curious, what makes you say that? I have one org in my company that’s repatriating their app due to aws storage costs.
BrainWaveCC@reddit
Please note the use of the term "en mass" in my original response.
Sure, some folks are going to do it. But most will not.
tankerkiller125real@reddit
You and me both... We're dropping 12K a month on Azure stuff, when a couple grand in servers and maybe $400-500/month in co-lo costs would get us the same exact results.
SevaraB@reddit
Unless you’ve got a grandfathered cage with space for those servers, cute that you think the colo providers won’t take the opportunity to jack up the costs.
Price hikes tend to ripple out into related markets.
Zenkin@reddit
But our colos could literally double their prices and it would still be a hell of a lot cheaper than the cloud alternatives. I'm sure prices will go up because the price of electricity is surging, but that doesn't negate the huge cost savings in any way.
I'm sure if we could re-engineer all of our client's stuff to be cloud native, it could theoretically be done cheaper, but that's just not what's happening in the SMB world.
Inquisitive_idiot@reddit
Dude don’t give them any ideas 😓
tankerkiller125real@reddit
Even if the Colos price hiked it would still be cheaper to run in colos... And that's despite the fact that we're using "cloud native" functionality.
ngdsinc@reddit
Colo provider here…years ago everyone was loudly announcing they were moving to the cloud, and since then many of them have been quietly moving back to colo or hybrid. Now that everyone and their brother are doing AI it has driven up demand and costs for large commits on builds to the point that some providers have even started ignoring the single cabinet opportunities that was once their main source of income.
techforallseasons@reddit
How so?
"Glacier" will still exist, it just an S3 storage class instead its own service. As a current user of both -- I much prefer the S3 storage class edition; OG Glacier vaults provided a terrible interface to the data layer.
As a plus, I can setup data to automatically migrate to Glacier with lifecycle rules so I can keep things for regulatory reasons cheaply without needing to repackage them.
theoriginalharbinger@reddit
Yeah. It was annoying to work with, and if you (as a vendor) had a software product that did both S3 and Glacier, you would ultimately end up with customers pissed off at you.
We sold a backup offering that used Glacier way back when, and our ToS was clear: If you used S3 straight across (standard hot storage), your monthly bill would be higher, but recoveries within standard business use (something like you could recover 100% of what you backed up once per year and could recover up to 10% in any given month) were included in the cost. If you went with Glacier, we'd knock something like 25% off the monthly cost, but you would get pre-billed for any recovery that came out of Glacier and had to settle for a best-effort RTO.
I cannot describe how many cheap customers went with the Glacier option and then shouted at me on the phone about how we were holding their data hostage. I got sick of it, our devs hated it, our customer service folks hated it (legacy Glacier had something like a 24 hour SLA to make requested data available, if memory serves) because nobody wants to explain why their business is non-functioning because a penny pincher went with the cheap option.
S3 Glacier at least makes the API's more coherent. I think the people who liked Glacier the most were the ones who recovered the least from it.
kittyyoudiditagain@reddit
Go hybrid. We have some data stored in the cloud but our tape library is still quite effective and a fraction of the cost to store in the cloud. You can get an archive orchestrator to do the management. We use deepspace storage and just set a bunch of rules on where and when to place the objects. 2PB is cost prohibitive to store in the cloud, our Spectra tape system still holds 10x what we have in the cloud. Take your budget back.
panda_bro@reddit
I found the Amazon Glacier product line to be a bit clunky to use, with the concept of vaults and whatnot. It always felt disconnected from their storage products.
We just migrated about 2 PB of data to S3 Glacier Deep Archive, and honestly, it was straightforward and much cleaner to manage. Pricing has been great too (fingers crossed we never have to retrieve it).
This doesn't strike me as a massive announcement, as the functionality still exists. It's just collapsing into S3 which is easier to work with overall.
Myriade-de-Couilles@reddit
2 PB !! What would be the retrieval cost for this?
Medium_Banana4074@reddit
These backups/archives are most of the times for absolute emergency thus the price of retrieval will still be less than the company going out of business.
To me it is the "my house burned down" backup and will hopefully never be downloaded again. But should I need it, it will be available.
zrad603@reddit
it's not the retrieval costs where they get you. It's the bandwidth/transfer fees. $0.09/GB AND they charge that even if you order an AWS Snowball.
panda_bro@reddit
A lot less than our company folding :)
I’ve done the math and…a lot. But it’s just an immutable, break the glass, the sky is falling type backup for us.
RedDidItAndYouKnowIt@reddit
https://aws.amazon.com/s3/glacier/pricing/
flunky_the_majestic@reddit
What an irritating response.
Medium_Banana4074@reddit
The glacier API was always weird and I use S3 with storage class DEEP_ARCHIVE for a while now. Has the same(ish) price and can be used with S3 tools.
mrbiggbrain@reddit
This is the old Glacier API. You could still use it but AWS has been pushing people to the S3 based endpoints for a while. This is just them finally saying "No" and is more pushing integration and backup products to get to the future or get out.
malikto44@reddit
The funny thing is that Glacier, and using it via vaults and its own API isn't that bad for storage that you use as last resort storage. Glacier and Glacier DeepArchive are not for restoring. They are insurance, where if everything else fails, you can pay through the nose for a restore.
I use it as part of a 3-2-1-1-0 setup, where technically it is 3-2-1.5-1-0, where I have one offsite backup storage (Backblaze), and also use Glacier. This in addition to offline backups.
seizedengine@reddit
That happened many years ago. They're just retiring the OG Glacier interface that was challenging to use.
i-void-warranties@reddit
Yeah, everyone needs to put down their pitchforks.
waka_flocculonodular@reddit
Can't, I put my pitchforks in glacier storage
makore256@reddit
I also got this note, i still haven't a clue what it means, once every year or 2 i update my cold backup (photos docs etc) via the Synology app I used to originally set it up and for which I'm charged a few bucks a month. If it keeps on working as such great if it stops so be it, it is so hard to follow changes to products on the cloud..... I miss the on prem days
notedlycircular@reddit
Those S3 classes have existed for years. From this blog post in 2018:
(S3 Glacier Deep Archive [was announced in 2018[(https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2018/11/s3-glacier-deep-archive/) and went GA in 2019)
What's going away are those Glacier direct APIs, for new customers. See the Amazon Glacier docs here:
As Corey Quinn put it in his Last Week in AWS newsletter:
Frothyleet@reddit
I don't feel like he knows what a "red herring" is
Hotshot55@reddit
Hasn't glacier always been S3 to some degree?
badaccount99@reddit
For the last 7 years it has been a part of S3. But this is about the legacy Glacier that existed outside of S3 before that which had it's own UI and APIs outside of S3. The cost was the same, just the way to upload/download data was different.
To 99.9% of the AWS customers this isn't important and means nothing to them.
Afraid-Donke420@reddit
We just migrated our entire Amazon stack for our web team over to Vercel
Amazon bill was ~60k
Vercel is about ~25k now
whatyoucallmetoday@reddit
Do you have a link? Our business just finished moving data into S3 and different glacier levels.
Jmc_da_boss@reddit
Sounds like this is their dedicated offering, if you went into glacier buckets your fine
Fuzzmiester@reddit
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazonglacier/latest/dev/introduction.html
not quite the same text, but still: