More AWS Price Drops: Glacier, CloudWatch, Storage Gateway Amazon Web Services (AWS), recently announced a new round of cost-cutting measures for several of its cloud services. AWS’ cloud storage offerings, Simple Storage Service (S3) Glacier, Storage Gateway and CloudWatch Custom Metrics are all affected. AWS is lowering the per GB cost of S3 Standard Storage in most regions by up to 28 percent. It is also reorganizing the pricing structure, moving from six tiers down to three. Jeff Barr, AWS evangelist, illustrated the S3 price changes in this table. [Click on the image for a larger view] S3 Standard Storage pricing, effective Dec. 1. Source: Jeff Barr/AWS blog. Barr pointed out that the S3 service was launched 10 years ago at a starting price $0.15 per GB per monthly — a lot compared to today’s much lower costs. AWS has also reduced the cost of Glacier’s archival storage service to customers in most of its regions. Barr stated that 1GB can be stored for 1 month in the US East, Norther Virginia, US West, Oregon, or EU (Ireland), for $0.004 (less then half a cent per month, a 43% reduction). For reference, this amount of storage cost $0.010 in 2012 when Glacier was launched and $0.007 in 2013 after a 30% price drop. The company will also replace its rate-based model to retrieve data from Glacier by three new options.

• The Standard retrieval option costs $0.01 per gigabyte and $0.05 for each 1,000 requests.
• The “Expedited” retrieval option returns data requests in five minutes and costs $0.03 per gigabyte (or $0.01 per request).
• Bulk retrievals are for non-critical data and take between five to 12 hours. They cost $0.0025 per gigabyte and $0.025 per 1,000 requests.

AWS announced Tuesday that pricing for Storage Gateway is changing. Storage Gateway volumes and virtual tapes are now available at a discounted price of 28 percent per gigabyte, while archived virtual cassettes will be as low as 43 percent. AWS will also replace its monthly gateway fee with data-based pricing. AWS announced that the monthly gateway fee will be replaced with pricing based on how much data your gateway writes AWS when it’s being used. “In all regions, $0.01 per GB will be charged up to a maximum monthly cost of $125 per gateway. New customers will receive 100 GB free of charge to allow them to set up and test the service. AWS will also be switching to a per GB pricing structure for Storage Gateway. This is a departure from the old rate-based structure. The company stated that $0.01 per GB will be charged for data retrieval in all regions. This provides more predictability and lower costs than the previous rate-based pricing structure. AWS is also cutting the price of CloudWatch Custom metrics by up to 96 percent. AWS previously provided 10 custom metrics for free to users, with each subsequent metric costing $0.50 per monthly. Barr posted last week that the new CloudWatch metrics pricing would be effective Dec. 1: CloudWatch metrics pricing U.S. East. Source: Jeff Barr/AWS blog. Barr says that the first 10 metrics will remain free. CloudWatch users who have EC2 Detailed monitoring will save money. “With per-month charges reduced to $3.50 per instance per monthly to $2.10 or less based on volume tier,” Barr stated. This latest round of price cuts follows AWS’ announcement earlier in the month that it would reduce the cost of several EC2 instances 25 percent. These price reductions are expected to be in effect starting Dec. 1.