Title

AWS re:Invent 2023 - Optimizing storage price and performance with Amazon S3 (STG211)

Summary

Andrew Kutze and Carl Summers from AWS, along with Nova Dasarma from Anthropic, discuss optimizing storage and access on Amazon S3.
The session covers monitoring storage growth, optimizing storage costs, and achieving high performance with minimal effort.
S3 Storage Lens is highlighted for its ability to provide organization-wide visibility and insights into object storage usage.
The importance of understanding storage requirements, developing insights, and optimizing storage is emphasized.
Lifecycle policies and storage classes are discussed for managing data with known or predictable access patterns.
S3 Intelligent Tiering is introduced for data with unknown or unpredictable access patterns, automatically optimizing storage costs at the object level.
Performance optimization strategies include designing for scale, minimizing request latencies, and maximizing throughput.
The AWS Common Runtime (CRT) is recommended for implementing best practices for latency and throughput improvements.
MountPoint for Amazon S3 is presented as a new open-source file client for Linux-based applications to connect to S3 buckets.
Anthropic shares their use case of managing over 200 petabytes of data on S3, achieving high data transfer rates for AI model training.
Tips for optimizing S3 usage include optimizing object size, using ranged requests, scaling across multiple prefixes, leveraging CRT, and thinking asynchronously.

S3 Storage Lens is a critical tool for large-scale S3 customers, providing detailed insights into storage usage and enabling cost optimization strategies.
Understanding the access patterns of data is crucial for selecting the appropriate storage class and lifecycle policies to minimize costs.
S3 Intelligent Tiering can lead to significant cost savings by automatically moving data to lower-cost access tiers based on changing access patterns.
Performance optimization is not just about selecting the right storage class but also involves key naming strategies, client configuration, and parallelization of requests.
The AWS Common Runtime (CRT) is a valuable asset for developers, as it encapsulates best practices for S3 interactions and can lead to performance gains.
MountPoint for Amazon S3 addresses the need for applications that require file-like APIs to interact with S3, potentially opening up new use cases and simplifying integration for legacy applications.
Anthropic's case study demonstrates the scalability and performance capabilities of S3 for demanding workloads such as AI model training, highlighting the importance of S3's elasticity and intelligent tiering for cost-effective data management.
The session underscores the continuous innovation in S3's capabilities, both in terms of cost optimization and performance enhancements, to meet the growing and diverse needs of AWS customers.