Amazon Web Services announced that you can apply AWS tags to your Glacier vaults to achieve more comprehensive cost allocation.

Amazon Glacier is a storage service optimized for infrequently used, or “cold” data. The service provides durable and extremely low-cost storage with security features for data archiving and backup. Recently, Amazon Web Services announced that you can apply AWS tags to your Glacier vaults to achieve more comprehensive cost allocation.

Consequently, Amazon Glacier has become an even more powerful tool for minimizing AWS costs than ever. In this article, I will explain how to best use AWS tags to help minimize your spending.

First, you’ll need to go back and apply AWS tags to any of your existing vaults and obviously tag any new vaults that you create in the future. It’s pretty simple, as you can see from this example where I have tagged a vault with the key=”videos” and a value of “VPC”.

Now, if we were to back up all of our Cloud Academy VPC videos in this vault, we would instantly know exactly what’s inside even years later.

Besides just reminding yourself of what each vault holds, you can also use AWS tags on vaults in conjunction with the AWS Cost Allocation Reports to view a breakdown of costs and usage by tag.

You can assign up to 10 tags to each of your Glacier vaults according to any number of categories, including department, owner, role, or anything you can think of to help you track your vaults), to visualize your Glacier storage costs broken down by all kinds of metrics. How you use this is going to be entirely up to you, but, assuming you want to keep your costs down, locating your biggest sources of Glacier spending and determining the value of keeping those vaults around can represent a considerable source of savings.

Amazon Glacier on Cloud Academy

If you aren’t yet familiar with Amazon Glacier, Cloud Academy has plenty of great resources to help you out:

Course – AWS Storage Fundamentals

AWS 140, from Cloud Academy’s comprehensive Amazon Web Services learning tracks series, is an introduction to Amazon’s data storage infrastructure.

As you’d expect, Amazon’s AWS has some pretty effective data backup and storage solutions. This course will introduce you to the basic roles and practical use of Amazon’s entire storage family. You will explore the function and structure of Amazon’s S3, Glacier, and Storage Gateway services, how those services can be used together to create an end-to-end data backup and storage management system, and how EBS volumes work with EC2 instances.

Quiz – Glacier Quiz

A series of questions specifically related to Amazon Glacier to test your understanding.

AWS tags – further reading:

Official AWS Announcement about tag your Amazon Glacier vaults

Why do you need to tag?