- Amazon Glacier is a storage service optimized for archival, infrequently used data, or “cold data.”
- Glacier is an extremely low-cost storage service that provides durable storage with security features for data archiving and backup.
- Glacier is designed to provide average annual durability of 99.999999999% for an archive.
- Glacier redundantly stores data in multiple facilities and on multiple devices within each facility.
- To increase durability, Glacier synchronously stores the data across multiple facilities before returning SUCCESS on uploading archives.
- Glacier performs regular, systematic data integrity checks and is built to be automatically self-healing.
- Glacier enables customers to offload the administrative burdens of operating and scaling storage to AWS, without having to worry about capacity planning, hardware provisioning, data replication, hardware failure detection and recovery, or time-consuming hardware migrations.
- Glacier is a great storage choice when low storage cost is paramount, with data rarely retrieved, and retrieval latency of several hours is acceptable.
- S3 should be used if applications requires fast, frequent real time access to the data
- Glacier can store virtually any kind of data in any format.
- All data is encrypted on the server side with Glacier handling key management and key protection. It uses AES-256, one of the strongest block ciphers available
- Glacier allows interaction through AWS Management Console, Command Line Interface CLI and SDKs or REST based APIs.
- management console can only be used to create and delete vaults.
- rest of the operations to upload, download data, create jobs for retrieval need CLI, SDK or REST based APIs
- Use cases include
- Digital media archives
- Data that must be retained for regulatory compliance
- Financial and healthcare records
- Raw genomic sequence data
- Long-term database backups
Tags:
cloud computing