The lowest-cost archive storage with milliseconds retrieval for rarely accessed data
Amazon S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval is an archive storage class that delivers the lowest-cost storage for long-lived data that is rarely accessed and requires retrieval in milliseconds. With S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval, you can save up to 68% on storage costs compared to using the S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA) storage class, when your data is accessed once per quarter. S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval delivers the fastest access to archive storage, with the same throughput and milliseconds access as the S3 Standard and S3 Standard-IA storage classes. S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval is designed for 99.999999999% (11 nines) of data durability and 99.9% availability by redundantly storing data across multiple physically separated AWS Availability Zones. It is designed for rarely accessed data that still needs immediate access in performance-sensitive use cases like image hosting, online file-sharing applications, medical imaging and health records, news media assets, and genomics.
Benefits
Retrievals in milliseconds
Amazon S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval delivers the same low latency and high throughput performance as the S3 Standard and S3 Standard-IA storage classes, making it ideal for storing data like medical images, genomic sequences, satellite images, news media assets, and user-generated content that require milliseconds access.
Unmatched durability and scalability
Amazon S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval runs on the world’s largest global cloud infrastructure with virtually unlimited scalability and is designed for 99.999999999% (11 nines) of durability. Data is automatically distributed across multiple Availability Zones that are geographically separated within an AWS Region.
Most comprehensive security and compliance capabilities
Amazon S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval offers integration with AWS CloudTrail to log, monitor, and retain storage API call activities for auditing, and it supports three different forms of encryption. S3 also supports security standards and compliance certifications, including SEC Rule 17a-4, PCI-DSS, HIPAA/HITECH, FedRAMP, EU GDPR, and FISMA. Amazon S3 Object Lock enables WORM storage capabilities, helping satisfy compliance requirements for virtually every regulatory agency around the globe.
Learn more about AWS Security »
Learn more about AWS Compliance »
Easily manage your data lifecycle
Cost-effectively manage data through its lifecycle across the S3 storage classes, which share the S3 APIs. You can use S3 Lifecycle to easily transition your data to lower-cost storage classes, as its data becomes less frequently accessed—without having to perform any data migration.
Low cost
S3 Glacier Retrieval is the lowest cost archive storage with milliseconds retrieval for rarely accessed data. It is ideal for data that is accessed once or twice per quarter, and that requires immediate access.
How it works — Amazon S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval storage class
S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval delivers the lowest-cost storage for long-lived data that is rarely accessed and requires milliseconds retrieval. The easiest way to store data in S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval is to use the S3 PUT API to upload data directly, or use S3 Lifecycle to transition data from the S3 Standard and S3 Standard-IA storage classes.
Amazon S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval resources
Use cases
Media asset workflows
Media and entertainment assets such as video and news footage require durable storage and can grow to many petabytes over time. Much of this data needs to be available immediately for breaking news events, video rendering, or content development. The Amazon S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval storage class allows you to archive older media content affordably while still making it available in milliseconds when it’s needed. To save even more on storage costs for media archives that don’t require milliseconds access, you can use S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval (Formerly S3 Glacier) or S3 Glacier Deep Archive.
Healthcare information archiving
Hospital systems need to retain petabytes of patient records (such as LIS, PACS, and EHR) for decades to meet regulatory requirements. The Amazon S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval storage class is ideal for medical images or genomics, where milliseconds retrieval is required.
Scientific data analytics
Research organizations generate, analyze, and archive vast amounts of data, such as for genomics or to train machine learning models. With the Amazon S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval storage class, you avoid the complexities of hardware and facility management and capacity planning, with the lowest-cost storage and milliseconds retrieval.
Customers
Snap
Snap Inc. builds the popular visual messaging app Snapchat, which enhances relationships with friends, family, and the world. More than 363 million daily active users use Snapchat to share and save photos and videos. Though it started with a focus on ephemeral content, such as photos that would disappear after a few seconds, the app has become a place for Snapchatters—as Snapchat users are called—to store media and memories long term, if they choose. Snap migrated more than 2 exabytes of data—roughly equivalent to 1.5 trillion media files—seamlessly to Amazon S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval.
“We chose to migrate to AWS because of its global reach, excellent performance, and competitive pricing that, in turn, gave us the ability to reinvest in our business...The fact that no customer noticed this major migration to Amazon S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval was a big win for us. It was a seamless experience for end users, and we had no production issues during the entire migration.”
Vijay Manoharan, Manager of the Media-Delivery Platform Team - Snap Inc.
Canva
Canva is an online design tool that empowers users worldwide to design, edit, and publish anything they can dream up. Running on AWS has helped Canva move fast and keep up with the rapid scaling of their user base over the last 10 years. Since launching in 2013, Canva’s site has grown from humble beginnings to over 100 million monthly active users, who’ve created over 15 billion designs together.
"Canva saves roughly $300,000 per month ($3.6 million annually) using Amazon S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval, and given the ever-growing amount of user-generated data we store, these savings continue to grow over time."
Josh Smith, Engineering Lead for the Core Data team - Canva
Blog: How Canva saves over $3 million annually in Amazon S3 costs »
Nascar
The National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing, Inc. (NASCAR) is the sanctioning body for the No. 1 form of motorsports in the United States.
“The new Amazon S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval storage class provides low storage cost for the NASCAR Library which houses our growing media archives, and enables our content creators to interact with data of any age in near real time. We manage one of the largest racing media archives in the world. Our customers, who range from the NASCAR Cup series teams to producers, editors, and engineers generate video, audio, and images, many of which are stored in perpetuity. The new storage class will help us save on our storage cost while greatly improving on our restore performance. Now, we can benefit from lower storage cost, with the resiliency of multi-AZ storage, and with immediate retrievals for any media asset!”
Chris Wolford, Senior Director of Media & Event Technology - NASCAR
Blog: Modernizing NASCAR’s multi-PB media archive at speed with AWS Storage »
Amagi
Amagi is a global media technology SaaS leader providing end-to-end cloud-managed live, on-demand video, and monetisation solutions for broadcast and streaming TV.
"With S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval, Amagi is excited to improve data retrieval performance for our content owners. Many of our customers using our cloud video on-demand SaaS platforms have asset archival workflows that require fast retrieval of those assets, such as archived TV content, in the rare event they're requested. The S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval storage class lets our cloud broadcasting customers save on storage costs, helps monetise their data by increasing revenue opportunities, and gives them peace of mind that their data will be accessed quickly when a viewer engages with the content."
Vijaya Sagar Vinnakota, VP Engineering - Amagi
Blog: How Amagi uses Amazon S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval to optimize media storage costs »
Pixieset
Pixieset is an all-in-one platform for modern photographers, offering photo client galleries, websites, online stores and studio management software tools.
"Pixieset's mission is to support photographers and creatives across the world as they run and grow their business. Our customers expect and rely on us to seamlessly deliver valuable and timeless photographs to their clients. With Amazon S3, we are able to store petabytes of images reliably and retrieve them instantly. As the number of creatives using our platform and unlimited storage option continues to grow, we're storing more and more photos forever. Photographers and creatives don't want to manage their growing galleries of photos, and instead want to focus on creating authentic memories. With S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval, we are able to scale our storage in a cost-effective manner, while continuing to deliver the same real-time access to photos that our users love today."
Sam Lin, Director of Engineering - Pixieset
Intelerad
Intelerad is a leading medical image management provider and is empowering healthcare organizations around the world with the speed, scalability, and simplicity needed to increase business performance while, most importantly, improving patient outcomes.
“The S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval storage class fills a market gap for companies servicing customers in the medical imaging and collaborative care market. Our imaging systems empower some of the largest health systems, radiology practices, subspecialty practices, and clinical research organizations to think about their medical imaging data as an asset that could provide new diagnostic and therapy insights. With these long-lived datasets growing at exponential rates, we not only want to manage cost, but also provide the tooling needed to advance patient care. With S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval, we are able to lower storage costs for imaging workloads that require data to be immediately accessible when requested, such as when a radiologist needs to review a patient’s prior history or a collection of archived images needs to be analyzed.”
Daniel Ostrow, Chief Enterprise Architect - Intelerad
CloudSoDA.io
From production through distribution, CloudSoDA.io enables real-time cost analytics and data movement, minimizing storage costs to achieve clients' business goals.
“CloudSoDA.io is excited about the launch of the S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval storage class. SoDA lets our customers—who range from news and sports broadcasters to post production houses—automate file movement in and out of the cloud. Many of these customers are storing petabytes of archival media assets in perpetuity, even though only a small percentage of those assets are ever accessed. With S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval, our customers can further lower their storage costs for long-lived archive data and know that their data is accessible in milliseconds for events like a breaking news cycle.”
Greg Holick, VP of Product - SoDA
Dropsuite
Dropsuite helps organizations in 139 countries simply back up, recover, and protect their important business information. Its email backup solution currently backs up company data for more than one million individual users.
“Using Amazon S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval gives us the best of both worlds: instant access to data stored in an extremely cost-effective manner. We can access our archived data in milliseconds and immediately render it to our customers. Backup is one of those businesses where you don’t need the backup until you really need it. And when you need it, you suddenly need it urgently and immediately. By designing our solutions on top of Amazon S3, we can deliver on our customers’ requirements. We mimic our customers’ usage patterns and store their data in an optimized way. With our data in S3, our customers can search, package, retrieve, and restore data at a very fast pace.”
Manjor Kalyanaraman, Chief Technology Officer - Dropsuite
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BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Archives Technology and Services team needed a modern solution to centralize, digitize, and migrate its 100-year-old flagship archives. The team wanted to merge its archives to enhance the preservability and accessibility of the media for future use.
"By using Amazon S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval, we can benefit from expedited retrieval from the archive while having cost flexibility.”
Mark Glanville, Sr. Technical Architect Archives Technology and Services - BBC
Get started with Amazon S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval
The easiest way to store data in S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval is to use the S3 PUT API to upload data directly, or use S3 Lifecycle to transition data from the S3 Standard and S3 Standard-IA storage classes.
Get started building with Amazon S3 in the AWS Management Console.