1The Hidden Costs of IA
A common mistake is moving active data to Standard-IA just because the storage price per GB is lower. However, Standard-IA charges a retrieval fee every time an object is read. If you put an active website logo in Standard-IA, your bill will explode due to retrieval fees. Furthermore, IA classes have a minimum storage duration of 30 days; deleting an object after 5 days still incurs a 30-day charge.
2The Magic of Intelligent-Tiering
Predicting access patterns across millions of objects is practically impossible for humans. S3 Intelligent-Tiering solves this by monitoring access. If an object isn't touched for 30 days, it moves to the Infrequent tier. If untouched for 90 days, it moves to Archive. If it's suddenly read, it instantly moves back to the Frequent tier with no retrieval fees. For unknown workloads, Intelligent-Tiering is the best practice.
