Amazon Web Services now offers a new product called Amazon Glacier. Glacier is a cloud storage solution that lets you store lots of files in the cloud at a cheap price. The draw back is that it is designed to be slower to access meaning that a file you request could take several hours to arrive.
Due to the slow process of getting data, the main types of files you would want to store are those that you do not need immediate access to. Think of old pictures, documents, database backups etc…
Price wise, Amazon Glacier costs $0.01/GB/Month making it an extremely cheap option. Throw in the data retention and no fixed costs per month (pay for what you use), you get a fantastic deal.
The service works by you uploading a file or files in to a vault. You use the Access Management service and AWS Identity to get access to these files.
To use Amazon Glacier you simply:
* Use the AWS Management Console or the Amazon Glacier APIs to create vaults. You use vaults to organize the archives you upload to Glacier.
* Use the simple Amazon Glacier APIs to upload and retrieve archives.
* Monitor the status of your Amazon Glacier jobs using the Amazon Glacier APIs. You can also, optionally, configure your vault to send you a notification via the Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) when your jobs complete.
* Pay for what you use. Your monthly bill is based on the amount of data stored and transferred.
Full details can be found over here.
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