Q: You have 100TB of data in S3 that is accessed very infrequently (once a year for audit). How do you minimize storage costs?
Use S3 Glacier Deep Archive — cheapest storage class. ~$1/TB/month vs S3 Standard ~$23/TB/month.
#AWS #S3 & Storage #L3 #Cloud #Infrastructure #S3
🎙️ Candidate Opening & Architectural Context
""When an interviewer asks how I troubleshoot this in AWS, I frame it through my hands-on production experience. When addressing this question, I walk the interviewer through our production incident runbook: isolating the blast radius, checking diagnostic logs and metrics, and applying a safe fix.""
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🛠️ Production Runbook & Step-by-Step Resolution
1️⃣
Initial Diagnostics & Root Cause Analysis
Use S3 Glacier Deep Archive — cheapest storage class. ~$1/TB/month vs S3 Standard ~$23/TB/month.
- Use S3 Lifecycle Policy to auto-transition objects to Glacier after X days.
- Or directly upload to Glacier class if you know immediately it's archival.
- S3 Intelligent-Tiering — auto-moves between tiers based on access patterns (good if access pattern is unpredictable).
2️⃣
Remediation & Permanent Safeguards
Retrieval: takes 12 hours. For audit use case, 12 hours is acceptable. If you need faster retrieval (hours not days), use S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval (expedited: 1-5 min, standard: 3-5 hours). Setup: Also consider:
- S3 Storage Lens — visibility into which buckets/prefixes have stale data.
💡 The Senior SRE Gold Nugget (Key Architectural Takeaway)
"Pro-Tip: Use S3 Lifecycle Policy to auto-transition objects to Glacier after X days.."
⚡ 60-Second Elevator Pitch Talking Points
- Use S3 Lifecycle Policy to auto-transition objects to Glacier after X days.
- Or directly upload to Glacier class if you know immediately it's archival.
- S3 Intelligent-Tiering — auto-moves between tiers based on access patterns (good if access patter...
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