Question

A media company stores 400 TB of user-uploaded objects in a single S3 Standard bucket. Access patterns are unpredictable: some objects are hit thousands of times per day while others are never touched again after upload, and the pattern for any given object cannot be predicted in advance. The FinOps team wants to reduce storage costs without introducing retrieval latency for objects that suddenly become popular, and without the operational burden of analyzing access logs to build custom lifecycle rules. Which approach best meets these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Enable S3 Intelligent-Tiering as the storage class for the objects, allowing automatic movement between frequent and infrequent access tiers based on observed access.

Answer

Create an S3 Lifecycle rule that transitions all objects to S3 Standard-IA after 30 days and to S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval after 90 days.

Answer

Use S3 Storage Lens to analyze access frequency monthly and manually move cold objects to S3 Glacier Deep Archive via batch operations.

Answer

Transition all objects immediately to S3 One Zone-IA to reduce storage costs while keeping data readily accessible.