Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently announced updates to its Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), with:
- New S3 One Zone-IA (Infrequent Access) Storage Class that’s 20% less expensive than Standard -IA storage class, and
- General availability of S3 Select – a retrieval tool that lets users retrieve data subsets or only the data needed by application, from an object with the help of simple SQL expressions, leading to a 400% possible performance improvement in the process.
Amazon S3 is an object storage that allows enterprises to store and retrieve large amount of data from websites, mobile applications, corporate applications, and data from IoT devices and sensors.
S3 One Zone-IA Storage Class can be called an updated version of the existing Standard-IA storage class. The S3 One Zone-IA also stores data in a single AWS Availability Zone (AZ), and provides data durability same as other Amazon S3 storage classes.
However, it is around 20% cheaper than Standard-IA. But it can only store the data which doesn’t need additional level of protection, which means that if any AZ is physically destroyed because of earthquake or flood, the data could be permanently lost.
So, the aim of the new storage class is to reduce cost for secondary backups of on-premises data, or the data that can recreated.
Along with the new storage class, AWS announced that its S3 Select, which was available for preview since November last year, is now generally available.
Generally available S3 Select will now help developers retrieve only the needed data for their application, improving the performance by nearly 400% for many cases. For example, a developer at a large retailer analyzes weekly data from a single store, but the data of all the 200 stores is saved in a single file. He will need to download, decompress and process the entire data in the file to analyze the data of one store. S3 Select will enable him to retrieve only the desired data using a simple SQL expression, rather than retrieving the entire object.
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S3 Select and S3 One Zone-IA Storage Class are now available for use in all public AWS regions.
