Comment by bob1029

5 days ago

> Glacier restores are also no longer painfully slow.

Wouldn't this always depend on the length of the queue to access the robotic tape library? Once your tape is loaded it should move really quickly:

https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/ts4500-tape-library?topic=perfor...

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bob1029

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hinkley  5 days ago

> Once upon a time Glacier was its own service that had nothing to do with S3. If you look closely (hi, billing data!) you can see vestiges of how this used to be, before the S3 team absorbed it as a series of storage classes.

Your assumption holds if they still use tape. But this paragraph hints at it not being tape anymore. The eternal battle between tape versus drive backup takes another turn.

  • bob1029  5 days ago

    I am also assuming that Amazon intends for the Deep Archive tier to be a profitable offering. At $0.00099/gb-month, I don't see how it could be anything other than tape.

    • simonw  5 days ago

      I wonder if it's where old S3 hard drives go to die? Presumably AWS have the world's single largest collection of used storage devices - if you RAID them up you can probably get reliable performance out of them for Glacier?

      6 replies →

    • mappu  5 days ago

      My understanding is some AWS products (e.g. RDS) need very fast disks with lots of IOPS. To get the IOPS, though, you have to buy +++X TB sized SSDs, far more storage space than RDS actually needs. This doesn't fully utilize the underlying hardware, you are left with lots of remaining storage space but no IOPS. It's perfect for Glacier.

      The disks for Glacier cost $0 because you already have them.

      2 replies →