Introduction to Amazon Glacier

Overview:
Amazon Glacier is a safe, durable, and remarkably cheaper cloud storage service for data archiving and long-term backup. Amazon Glacier allows the customers to store their data like photos, videos, and documents in the form of the compressed files. These archived files are stored in a container that is called “Vault”. Every Archive has its own unique ID so that customers can identify easily. A single archive can be as large as 40 TB.

Customers can easily view their vaults list through AWS Management Console and can perform the vault operations like create vault, delete vault, lock vault, list vault metadata and retrieve vault with the help of AWS SDKs. You can store up to 1000 Vaults under a single account and manage their permissions for any user account on any specific vaults.

Retrieval Features:
Amazon Glacier comes with three retrieval features with a different cost. Retrieval features are Expedited, Standard, and Bulk retrievals.

Expedited Retrieval: With this option, the user can retrieve the archive within 1 to 5 minutes. We can use this retrieval option when we have an urgent request for archives. Expedited retrieval option is costlier than the rest of the options to retrieve archives.
Standard Retrieval:With this option, the user can retrieve the archive within 3 to 5 hours. This is a default option to retrieve the archives from Amazon Glacier. Standard retrieval feature is cheaper in cost than expedited retrieval.

Bulk Retrieval: This option is used to retrieve bulk archives such as gigabyte and petabyte archives. Bulk retrievals typically complete within 5–12 hours. This option is cheapest in cost.

AWS SDK:
Amazon Glacier supports the software development kit for Java, .NET, PHP, and Python (Boto) so that the user can easily upload and retrieve the archives. The SDK libraries wrap the underlying Amazon Glacier API simplifying your programming tasks. We can perform the following operations with the API request:

1. Uploading an archive.
2. Downloading an archive.
3. Deleting an archive.