[CharlesW]

Maybe the cold-to-hot migration "tax" is partially to prevent abuse?

> "Data retrieval is charged per GB when data in the Infrequent Access storage class is retrieved and is what allows us to provide storage at a lower price. It reflects the additional computational resources required to fetch data from underlying storage optimized for less frequent access."

I like the "automatic storage classes" idea as well.

> "…you can define an object lifecycle policy to move data to Infrequent Access after a period of time goes by and you no longer need to access your data as often. In the future, we plan to automatically optimize storage classes for data so you can avoid manually creating rules and better adapt to changing data access patterns."

[dmw_ng]

AWS already give you intelligent tiering for this, it's a very nice product but it's also just a nice way of hiding the same fees. Your $0.004/GB becomes $0.023/GB on first read for 1 month then $0.0125/GB for 2 months, so the average cost of storing it over those 3 months becomes $0.016/GB, and that's before considering monitoring fees

[sborsje]

You could also implement tiering yourself, depending on your workload of course. If you know you're storing objects for long-term archival reasons (or backups), you could opt for using S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval at $0.004/GB.