AWS Storage Costs: All in One Place

AWS provides multiple storage services—EBS, EFS, S3 and others. AWS storage costs are complex, and are scattered in multiple places on the Amazon website. We collected the most pertinent pricing information and condensed them into several easy to read tables, to help you gain a quick understanding of your storage costs in the most common scenarios. This can be useful for AWS cost optimization, or when planning an AWS migration.

In this post, we’ll review costs for Amazon EBS, EFS, S3 and S3 Glacier, and show how NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP can help reduce your Amazon storage costs.

In this article, you will learn:

• Overview of AWS cloud storage services
• Pricing details of AWS storage services
  • EBS pricing
  • EFS pricing
  • S3 storage pricing
  • Amazon Glacier pricing
• Reducing AWS storage costs with Cloud Volumes ONTAP 

Overview of AWS Cloud Storage Services

Amazon provides several popular cloud storage services. We briefly review them below, and in the following section explain their pricing structure in more detail.

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)
AWS EBS provides block data on persistent volumes attached to Amazon EC2 instances. Designed for workloads that require persistent storage accessible by single EC2 instances. Can be used for relational databases (like MySQL) or NoSQL databases (like MongoDB), stream processing, data warehousing, and other workloads requiring high throughput and low latency.

Amazon Elastic File System (EFS)
AWS EFS is a cloud-based shared file system that can be mounted as a drive on Amazon EC2 instances. Can scale elastically to petabytes. Provides shared access to data across thousands of Amazon EC2 instances. Can be used for lift and shift scenarios, CMS, dev/test, database backups, and persistent storage for Docker and Kubernetes.

Amazon S3
The popular object storage service designed to store and access any type of data. Provides 99.999999999% (twelve nines) durability and unlimited scalability. Can be used for backup and archiving, user-generated content, and as a data lake for big data scenarios.

Amazon S3 Glacier
Amazon S3 Glacier is the cold storage tier offered as part of Amazon S3. It provides low-cost cloud storage for archiving and long-term backup, with additional charges for data retrieval.

Additional Storage-Related Services
The following are additional storage services we will not cover in-depth in this article:

• AWS Storage Gateway—a software appliance that connects on-premises storage to Amazon cloud storage. See official pricing page.
• AWS backup—a fully managed backup service that centralizes backup activity across multiple AWS services, and can also manage on-premise backups. See our article on AWS backup pricing.
• AWS FSx Lustre—a cloud file system optimized for compute-intensive workloads and high-performance computing. See official pricing page.
• AWS FSx for Windows File Server—a cloud-based native Microsoft Windows file system, making it easy to move Windows-based applications to AWS. See official pricing page.

Pricing Details of AWS Storage Services

Amazon storage pricing is complex. Below, we attempt to provide an easy-to-read summary of the most important pricing options, across Amazon EBS, S3, Glacier, and Amazon EFS.

Unless specified otherwise, all the pricing shown is for the US East (N. Virginia) region.

Amazon pricing changes frequently. Consult the official pricing page for the latest prices. Also check out NetApp’s AWS Calculator to simulate your AWS storage costs across different services.

Also be sure to read our in-depth article comparing EBS pricing to EFS and S3.

EBS Pricing

AWS EBS is priced per GB-month used in EBS volumes. Prices are different for each of five types of EBS storage units.

Additional charges:

• For General Purpose SSD Volumes, there is an additional charge of $0.065 per provisioned IOPS month.
• For EBS Snapshots, there is a charge of $0.01 for data transfer to the US East region, or $0.02 for data transfer to any other region.

EFS pricing

AWS EFS provides three storage classes, with an option to limit bandwidth when accessing EFS file shares or pay separate for a specific amount of provisioned throughput, which lets you use more bandwidth. To learn more about these options, see our article on EFS performance.

S3 Storage Pricing

S3 pricing is a bit complex, and is broken down into storage costs, payment per data requests, and data transfer costs. In addition, there are management and data replication costs which we have not detailed below.

Storage

S3 charges for objects stored in buckets per GB, with a volume discount for larger data quantities. Pricing differs for two storage tiers:

• S3 Standard Tier—used for frequently accessed data
• S3 Standard Tier IA (Infrequent Access)—for infrequently accessed data that requires low-latency access
• S3 Intelligent Tiering—special tier offering automatic cost savings for data with dynamic access patterns

For S3 Intelligent-Tiering, there is an additional charge of $0.0025 per 1,000 objects stored. Amazon charges separately for storage by GB, and separately for the number of objects stored in S3, to compensate for the cost of processing the data to identify the optimal tier for each one.

Requests
In addition to storage space, S3 charges for requests made on objects stored in your S3 buckets.

All prices are per 1,000 requests.

Data retrieval requests are free of charge in all Amazon S3 tiers.

Data Transfer
The final component of S3 pricing is for data transfer in and out of S3.

There are a few exceptions, for which you do not need to pay for bandwidth: data transferred in from the internet, data transferred to EC2 when in the same AWS region, and data transferred to AWS CloudFront content delivery network.

Amazon Glacier Pricing

There are several Amazon storage tiers you can use to save storage costs for less-frequently-used data. Amazon Glacier is built to provide very low cost storage, starting at $0.004, which can rival the cost of storing archived data on tapes or other on-premise backup solutions. There are additional charges for requests and data transfers out of Amazon Glacier.

Data access options
Amazon Glacier provides three options for access to archives, with different pricing for each option:

• Expedited—data access within 1-5 minutes
• Standard—data access within 3-5 hours
• Bulk—data access within 5-12 hours

Reducing AWS Storage Costs with Cloud Volumes ONTAP

NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP, the leading enterprise-grade storage management solution, delivers secure, proven storage management services on AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. Cloud Volumes ONTAP supports up to a capacity of 368TB, and supports various use cases such as file services, databases, DevOps or any other enterprise workload.