AWS Glacier Terminology
1. Vaults: Vaults are virtual containers that are used to store data. Vaults in AWS Glacier are similar to buckets in S3.
- Each Vault has its specific access policies(Vault lock/access policies). Thus providing you with more control over who has what kind of access to your data.
- Vaults are region-specific.
2. Archives: Archives are the fundamental entity type stored in Vaults. Archives in AWS Glacier are similar to Objects in S3. Virtually you have unlimited storage capacity on AWS Glacier and hence, can store an unlimited number of archives in a vault.
3. Vault Access Policies: In addition to the basic IAM controls AWS Glacier offers Vault access policies that help managers and administrators have more granular control of their data.
- Each vault has its own set of Vault Access Policies.
- If either of Vault Access Policy or IAM control doesn’t pass for some user action. The user is not declared unauthorized.
4. Vault Lock Policies: Vault lock policies are exactly like Vault access policies but once set, they cannot be changed.
- Specific to each bucket.
- This helps you with data compliance controls. For example- Your business administrators might want some highly confidential data to be only accessible to the root user of the account, no matter what. Vault lock policy for such a use case can be written for the required vaults.
What is Amazon Glacier?
AWS offers a wide range of storage services that can be provisioned depending on your project requirements and use case. AWS storage services have different provisions for highly confidential data, frequently accessed data, and not-so-frequently accessed data. You can choose from various storage types namely, object storage, file storage, block storage services, backups, and data migration options. All of which fall under the AWS Storage Services list.
AWS Glacier: From the aforementioned list, AWS Glacier, is the backup and archival storage provided by AWS. It is an extremely low-cost, long-term, durable, secure storage service that is ideal for backups and archival needs. In a lot of its operations AWS Glacier is similar to S3, and, it interacts directly with S3, using S3-lifecycle policies. However, the main difference between AWS S3 and Glacier is the cost structure. The cost of storing the same amount of data in AWS Glacier is significantly less as compared to S3. Storage costs in Glacier can be as little as $1 for one petabyte of data per month.
Contact Us