Design Cost-Optimized Architectures

S3 Standard — highest storage price but no retrieval fee, millisecond access, and high durability/availability; ideal for frequently accessed, latency-sensitive data.

Standard-IA has a lower per-GB storage price but adds a per-GB retrieval fee, a 30-day minimum storage duration, and a 128 KB minimum billable object size. Best for infrequently accessed but rapidly needed data.

One Zone-IA stores data in a single Availability Zone, so it costs about 20% less than Standard-IA but data is lost if that AZ is destroyed. Use it for re-creatable or secondary-copy data.

When access patterns are unknown, changing, or unpredictable. It automatically moves objects between frequent, infrequent, and archive tiers based on access, with no retrieval fees, in exchange for a small per-object monthly monitoring/automation charge.

A small per-object monthly monitoring and automation fee. There are no retrieval fees, and objects auto-move between tiers based on access frequency.

Long-lived, rarely accessed (about once a quarter) data that still needs millisecond retrieval. Cheaper storage than Standard-IA but higher retrieval cost; 90-day minimum storage duration.