by Marcus Irani, Site Reliability Engineer, Electronic Arts
When using AWS S3 for storage, it’s crucial to consider object versioning and lifecycle management to avoid unnecessary costs. AWS S3 allows for the creation of multiple versions of the same object, and each version will incur additional storage charges. Therefore, it’s important to determine how to manage their lifecycle through different storage classes, including Standard, Intelligent-Tiering, Infrequent Access, and Glacier.
A team was storing backups of their database and using multiple S3 buckets for different environments of their application. They unintentionally generated large files at a high frequency which caused storage costs to skyrocket. These backups were also for a non-production environment. After noticing, the team visualized the activity and usage with S3 Storage Lens. By adjusting their storage-class transition policies and reducing the backup frequency, the team significantly decreased their storage costs.
