Cloudability Analyzing S3 bucket usage and associated costs

S3 billing data allows you to see the cost by S3 Bucket.

Use Case

S3 makes data available immediately, but it is not the cheapest way to store data. One alternative is to use Glacier for cheaper storage. However, Glacier requires a file restore process making users give up immediate access.

Leveraging Resource ID, Usage Type, Operation, and Item Description Dimensions, in addition to Tags, will allow for a data-driven approach to answering these questions per Bucket, and ensure a cost-optimized S3 environment.

The scenario

For S3, the Resource ID dimension in Cloudability shows the S3 Bucket name. Create a report filtered to Product Name equals Amazon Simple Storage Service with the Resource ID Dimension, and Metric of Cost (Total) to get a report of cost by Bucket:

The solution

You must understand how AWS charges for S3 and analyze the highest spending buckets by those factors. For example, you can review how to surface Buckets by Usage Type and Operation to determine which Buckets can be migrated to cheaper long-term storage.

Start by adding the Usage Type Dimension and then filter to the Bucket with the highest Requests-Tier1 cost total:

After that, add the Operation Dimension to get more granular data on how the Bucket is being used. If the data shows that there are many PUT and POST requests with a few attempts to access or query the Bucket data, it is possible to archive the Bucket to longer term storage:

You must understand the usage patterns of the data in S3 to decide if S3 is the right storage service for the data.

To learn more, see Simplifying Cloud Storage Costs: How AWS S3 Pricing Works .