Configuring Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering

What is AWS Intelligent Tiering?

Intelligent-Tiering automates storage dependent on access patterns. With Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering you can restore assets from cold storage in the Imagen platform. This cannot be done with standard S3 cold storage.

What use case does Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering work for?

Intelligent-Tiering is great for customers with unknown, changing, or unpredictable access patterns – i.e. content sharing applications! So, if you're producing lots of time-critical content that quickly becomes somewhat outdated but you still need the content to be searchable for future reuse, this is a very cost-effective approach.

How do the tiers' access patterns work?

If your content isn't accessed for a number of consecutive days then it will be downgraded through the tiers until it is accessed/rehydrated.

The below table represents how each tier behaves.

	Frequent Access	Infrequent Access	Archive Instant Access	Archive Access	Deep Archive Access
Access criteria (consecutive days)	<30 days	>30 days	+60 days (90 days total)	+90 days (180 days total)	+90 days (270 days total)
Retrieval time	Milliseconds	Milliseconds	Milliseconds	3-5 hrs	Within 12 hrs
Expedited retrieval	NA	NA	NA	1-5 mins	NA
Savings	NA	Up to 40% on storage costs	Up to 68% on storage costs	Up to 95% on storage costs	Up to 95% on storage costs
	HOT - Mandatory			COLD - optional (can choose one or both)

Please note: You can set the access criteria for your cold storage, but it does need to comply with the following...

Archive access has to have access criteria of 180 days in total minimum.
Deep Archive has to have access criteria under 2 years.

How does asset rehydration work in the Imagen platform?

Your renditions will stay in a standard S3 bucket as these are needed in ImagenWeb for playback etc. Your originals will sit in Intelligent Tiering buckets, so, when somebody tries to download this asset, dependent on the tier it is in a different message will appear upon download...
- Infrequent access - instant download
- Archive access - 3-5hrs to rehydrate "Upon restoring you will receive a notification when your file is ready to download. This can take a while".

How to set up the appropriate permissions?

You can enable users or groups to restore files and/or expedite the restoration of files.

Navigate to > Admin > Manage groups / Users
There are two options to be selected as appropriate:
- 'Restore archive files'
- 'Expedite restoration of archived files'

How is Intelligent-Tiering tracked in usage analytics?

You will see data for an asset that has been rehydrated. In the event service, this action will display as...

Media
- Action = 'Rehydrate'
- Sub-action = 'Notification' (if somebody has requested a file restore but it’s already in progress)

You will not see an asset downgrading through tiers
In time, as we use the ‘event service’-driven dashboards, these stats could show on our own User Intelligence dashboards.

What is the process for migrating from Standard S3 storage to S3 Intelligent-Tiering?

If Imagen host your AWS storage our deployment team with work with you to set up Intelligent Tiering.
If you manage your own storage, follow this AWS article to set up S3 Intelligent Tiering >>