65 articles on storage — what drives the cost, how it is priced, and where the savings actually are.
i4i storage-optimized instances offer faster NVMe local storage and better price-performance than the older i3 generation. For high-IOPS, low-latency local-disk workloads, the newer generation is usually the cost-effective choice. Here is the comparison.
AWS EBS, Azure Managed Disks, and GCP Persistent Disk price block storage similarly, by provisioned capacity and performance tier, with the fastest tiers charging for provisioned IOPS. This compares them and shows the shared optimization levers.
Compression shrinks the bytes you store, transfer, and scan, and cloud bills those bytes. Compressing data can cut storage, egress, and query cost at once, for a little CPU. Here is where compression pays and where it does not.
Most data cools over time: hot when new, cold within weeks, rarely touched within months. A tiered storage strategy moves data through cheaper tiers as it ages, cutting storage cost without losing access. Here is how to design one.
Data Lake Storage Gen2 prices like blob storage, hot, cool, cold, and archive tiers plus transaction and data-retrieval charges, with a hierarchical namespace. Matching tier to access frequency and minimizing transactions are the levers. Here is the model.
S3 Express One Zone charges far higher storage (around $0.16/GB-month) but much lower per-request costs than S3 Standard, in a single AZ for low latency. For request-heavy, latency-sensitive workloads it can be cheaper overall. Here is the math.
EFS charges storage plus, depending on throughput mode, either nothing extra (Bursting), per throughput used (Elastic), or per provisioned throughput. Picking the wrong mode over-pays or throttles. Here is how the modes price and when to use each.
Storage Gateway charges for the AWS storage it writes to (S3, EBS snapshots, or virtual tapes), requests, and data transfer, plus a per-gateway fee on some types. The bulk of the bill is the backing storage. Here is the model.
Managed disks bill by type and provisioned size (Premium SSD, Standard SSD, Standard HDD, Ultra), so you pay for capacity whether or not you use it. Ultra and Premium v2 add provisioned IOPS and throughput. Here is how to pick the right tier.
EBS snapshots bill about $0.05 per GB-month for changed blocks (they are incremental), or about $0.0125 in the Archive tier for rarely-restored snapshots. Snapshot sprawl from unmanaged schedules is the usual culprit. Here is how to control it.
FSx has four file system types, each billing storage plus throughput. Here's what Lustre, Windows File Server, NetApp ONTAP, and OpenZFS cost, which to use, and how to avoid over-provisioning throughput.
S3 (~$0.023/GB) is cheapest, EBS (~$0.08) middle, EFS (~$0.30) priciest, but they're not interchangeable. Here's how to match the service to the access pattern and avoid paying 13x by using EFS where S3 would do.
AWS Backup bills mostly for backup storage (GB-month) plus restore and cross-region copy. The bill grows from retention creep. Here's how the meters work and how to keep backups from piling up forever.
Persistent disks bill per provisioned GB-month by type: pd-standard ~$0.04, pd-balanced ~$0.10, pd-ssd ~$0.17. Here's which to use, why you pay for provisioned size, and how to stop over-paying for SSD.
Azure Blob tiers trade storage price for access price, and each cold tier adds a retention penalty. Here's the full picture, storage rates, access costs, minimum retention, and redundancy, and how to pick the right tier.
For 95% of production workloads, gp3 is the right choice (cheaper, performant enough). Use io2 only for over 16K IOPS sustained, 99.999% durability, or Multi-Attach. Here's the pricing math and the migration playbook.
Six S3 storage classes spanning 99x in per-GB price. Here's when Standard, Intelligent-Tiering, Standard-IA, One Zone-IA, Glacier Instant Retrieval, Glacier Flexible Retrieval, and Deep Archive each make sense, with lifecycle policy patterns.