Glacier
ELI5 — The Vibe Check
Glacier is AWS's deep-freeze storage. It's absurdly cheap — we're talking fractions of a penny per GB per month. The catch? Getting your data back can take minutes to hours (or 12 hours for Deep Archive). It's the attic of cloud storage — you throw stuff up there and hope you never need it urgently.
Real Talk
Amazon S3 Glacier is a low-cost storage class designed for data archiving and long-term backup. It offers three retrieval tiers: Expedited (1-5 minutes), Standard (3-5 hours), and Bulk (5-12 hours). Glacier Deep Archive is even cheaper with 12-48 hour retrieval times. Ideal for compliance archives, backups, and data you access less than once a year.
When You'll Hear This
"Compliance data goes to Glacier Deep Archive — we only need it for audits." / "Glacier costs $1/TB/month but don't expect fast retrieval."
Related Terms
Archive Storage
Archive storage is the cheapest tier of cloud storage for data you almost never access.
Backup
A database backup is a saved copy of your data at a specific point in time.
Object Lifecycle
Object lifecycle policies automatically manage your cloud storage objects as they age.
S3 (Simple Storage Service)
S3 is Amazon's giant file locker in the sky.
Storage Classes
Storage classes are tiers of cloud storage with different price/performance tradeoffs. Hot storage is fast and expensive (for stuff you access every day).