Managing S3 Intelligent-Tiering

The S3 Intelligent-Tiering storage class delivers automatic storage cost savings in three low-latency and high-throughput access tiers. It also offers optional archive capabilities to help you get the lowest storage costs in the cloud for data that can be accessed in minutes to hours.

Identifying which S3 Intelligent-Tiering access tier objects are stored in

To get a list of your objects and their corresponding metadata, including their S3 Intelligent-Tiering access tier, you can use Amazon S3 Inventory. S3 Inventory provides CSV, ORC, or Parquet output files that list your objects and their corresponding metadata. You can receive these inventory reports on either a daily or weekly basis for an Amazon S3 bucket or a shared prefix. (Shared prefix refers to objects that have names that begin with a common string.)

Viewing the archive status of an object within S3 Intelligent-Tiering

To receive notice when an object within the S3 Intelligent-Tiering storage class has moved to either the Archive Access tier or the Deep Archive Access tier, you can set up S3 Event Notifications. For more information, see Enabling event notifications.

Amazon S3 can publish event notifications to an Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topic, an Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) queue, or an AWS Lambda function. For more information, see Amazon S3 Event Notifications.

The following is an example of a message that Amazon S3 sends to publish an s3:IntelligentTiering event. For more information, see Event message structure.

{  
   "Records":[  
      {  
         "eventVersion":"2.3",
         "eventSource":"aws:s3",
         "awsRegion":"us-west-2",
         "eventTime":"1970-01-01T00:00:00.000Z",
         "eventName":"IntelligentTiering",
         "userIdentity":{  
            "principalId":"s3.amazonaws.com"
         },
         "requestParameters":{  
            "sourceIPAddress":"s3.amazonaws.com"
         },
         "responseElements":{  
            "x-amz-request-id":"C3D13FE58DE4C810",
            "x-amz-id-2":"FMyUVURIY8/IgAtTv8xRjskZQpcIZ9KG4V5Wp6S7S/JRWeUWerMUE5JgHvANOjpD"
         },
         "s3":{  
            "s3SchemaVersion":"1.0",
            "configurationId":"testConfigRule",
            "bucket":{  
               "name":"amzn-s3-demo-bucket",
               "ownerIdentity":{  
                  "principalId":"A3NL1KOZZKExample"
               },
               "arn":"arn:aws:s3:::amzn-s3-demo-bucket"
            },
            "object":{  
               "key":"HappyFace.jpg",
               "size":1024,
               "eTag":"d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e",              
            }
         },
         "intelligentTieringEventData":{
            "destinationAccessTier": "ARCHIVE_ACCESS"
            }
      }
   ]
}

You can also use a HEAD object request to view an object's archive status. If an object is stored in the S3 Intelligent-Tiering storage class and is in one of the archive tiers, the HEAD object response shows the current archive tier. To show the archive tier, the request uses the x-amz-archive-status header.

The following HEAD object request returns the metadata of an object (in this case, my-image.jpg).

HEAD /my-image.jpg HTTP/1.1
Host: bucket.s3.region.amazonaws.com
Date: Wed, 28 Oct 2009 22:32:00 GMT
Authorization: AWS AKIAIOSFODNN7EXAMPLE:02236Q3V0RonhpaBX5sCYVf1bNRuU=

You can also use HEAD object requests to monitor the status of a restore-object request. If the archive restoration is in progress, the HEAD object response includes the x-amz-restore header.

The following sample HEAD object response shows an object archived by using S3 Intelligent-Tiering with a restore request in progress.

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
x-amz-id-2: FSVaTMjrmBp3Izs1NnwBZeu7M19iI8UbxMbi0A8AirHANJBo+hEftBuiESACOMJp
x-amz-request-id: E5CEFCB143EB505A
Date: Fri, 13 Nov 2020 00:28:38 GMT
Last-Modified: Mon, 15 Oct 2012 21:58:07 GMT
ETag: "1accb31fcf202eba0c0f41fa2f09b4d7"
x-amz-storage-class: 'INTELLIGENT_TIERING'
x-amz-archive-status: 'ARCHIVE_ACCESS'
x-amz-restore: 'ongoing-request="true"'
x-amz-restore-request-date: 'Fri, 13 Nov 2020 00:20:00 GMT'
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Type: binary/octet-stream
Content-Length: 300
Server: AmazonS3

Restoring objects from the S3 Intelligent-Tiering Archive Access and Deep Archive Access tiers

To access objects in the S3 Intelligent-Tiering Archive Access and Deep Archive Access tiers, you must initiate a restore request, and then wait until the object is moved into the Frequent Access tier. For more information about archived objects, see Working with archived objects.

When you restore an object from the Archive Access tier or Deep Archive Access tier, the object moves back into the Frequent Access tier. Afterwards, if the object isn't accessed for 30 consecutive days, it automatically moves into the Infrequent Access tier. Then, after a minimum of 90 consecutive days of no access, the object moves into the Archive Access tier. After a minimum of 180 consecutive days of no access, the object moves into the Deep Archive Access tier. For more information, see How S3 Intelligent-Tiering works.

You can restore an archived object by using the Amazon S3 console, S3 Batch Operations, the Amazon S3 REST API, the AWS SDKs, or the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI). For more information, see Working with archived objects.