Launched in 2010, Amazon’s Reduced Redundancy Storage (RRS) class was a cheaper storage class than the standard S3 storage class, with one caveat. While standard S3 durability was 99.999999999%, this new class was only 99.99% durable. It was designed to hold data that was considered replaceable in the event of a data loss in more than 1 facility, while standard S3 can sustain data loss in 2 facilities.
When it launched, it was 33% cheaper per month than the standard class of storage. This was a big win for people with tons of data to store because at the time standard S3 prices were still high, at $.15 per GB stored and RRS came in – at the time – an amazingly cheaper rate of only $.10 per GB.
How times have changed!
We will address Amazon Glacier Storage in another post, so for now let’s focus on the S3 storage classes listed on the S3 Pricing page (us-east-1).
The following table shows the current S3 prices for storage.
| Price per GB | |
|---|---|
| S3 Standard Storage | |
| First 50 TB / month | $ 0.023 |
| Next 450 TB / month | $ 0.022 |
| Over 500 TB / month | $ 0.021 |
| S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA) Storage | |
| All Storage | $ 0.013 |
| S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access (S3 One Zone-IA) Storage | |
| All Storage | $ 0.010 |
Wait, what is missing? Reduced Redundancy Storage isn’t on the pricing page? All we get is this little note at the bottom:
As with other services, when AWS is looking to sunset something, they will typically take it off the main services page. Anyone remember SimpleDB? It’s still there, but it isn’t exactly highlighted in many place.
Let’s look at the pricing with RRS included:
| Price per GB | |
|---|---|
| S3 Standard Storage | $ 0.023 |
| First 50 TB / month | $ 0.022 |
| Next 450 TB / month | $ 0.021 |
| Over 500 TB / month | |
| S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA) Storage | |
| All Storage | $ 0.013 |
| S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access (S3 One Zone-IA) Storage | |
| All Storage | $ 0.010 |
| Reduced Redundency Storage | |
| First 1TB / month | $ 0.0240 |
| Next 49 TB / month | $ 0.0236 |
| Next 450 TB / month | $ 0.0232 |
| Next 500 TB / month | $ 0.0228 |
| Next 4,000 TB / month | $ 0.0224 |
| Over 5,000 TB / month | $ 0.0220 |
Well that is interesting. RRS isn’t cheaper than Standard S3 anymore. What happened to 33% off?
What does this tell us? With Amazon’s S3 Standard-IA and S3 One Zone-IA storage, you can significantly cut down your storage costs. Standard-IA is 46% cheaper while One Zone-IA is 58% cheaper.
Finally, depending how often you access this data, you will need to look at the request pricing.
| One Zone-IA and Standard-IA | RRS | |
|---|---|---|
| PUT, COPY or POST Requests | $0.01 per 1,000 requests | $0.005 per 1,000 requests |
| GET, SELECT and all other Requests | $0.001 per 1,000 requests | $0.0004 per 1,000 requests |
As you can see, RRS wins out on request pricing, being 50% or more cheaper in both categories. However, given that usually the highest cost of S3 is in the actual storage of the data, this probably won’t make up for the more expensive storage costs you incur with RRS.
The good news, is that if you’re still using RRS, you can easily migrate to the new storage classes:
ITS TIME TO START SAVING EVEN MORE MONEY WITH S3!
