Glacier

intermediate
data
Enhanced Content

Definition

AWS long-term archival storage service for data you rarely access. Like putting old documents in a warehouse - cheaper to store but takes time to retrieve.

Real-World Example

A company stores old employee records in Glacier for compliance, accessing them only when legally required.

Related Terms

Cloud Provider Equivalencies

All are low-cost, long-term object storage options for rarely accessed data. They trade lower storage price for higher retrieval latency and additional retrieval/early-deletion fees. AWS implements Glacier as S3 storage classes (managed through S3 APIs), while Azure uses an access tier on Blob Storage, and GCP/OCI use archive storage classes/tiers.

AWS
Amazon S3 Glacier (storage class) and S3 Glacier Deep Archive (storage class)
AZ
Azure Blob Storage Archive access tier
GCP
Google Cloud Storage Archive storage class
OCI
OCI Object Storage Archive tier

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