AWS S3 — Quick look on Amazon S3 Storage Lens

John Gakhokidze
3 min readNov 26, 2020

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AWS announced new feature for S3 on 11/18/2020 — Amazon S3 Storage Lens.

From AWS:

“Amazon S3 Storage Lens delivers organization-wide visibility into your object storage usage and activity trends, and makes actionable recommendations to improve cost-efficiency and apply data protection best practices. S3 Storage Lens is the first cloud storage analytics solution to provide a single view of object storage usage and activity across tens to hundreds of accounts in an AWS organization, with drill-downs to generate insights at the account, bucket, or even prefix level. Drawing from more than 14 years of experience helping customers optimize storage, S3 Storage Lens analyzes organization-wide metrics to deliver contextual recommendations to find ways to reduce your storage costs and apply best practices on data protection”

Here are some additional resources to learn more:

  1. Feature homepage
  2. Pricing — Click on Management and analytics tab, and select your region, scroll down to S3 Storage Lens pricing.

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As of 11/26/2020, pricing seems to be the same in all regions:

  • Free metrics are … Free 😄 (15 metrics out of a total of 29 — again as of 11/26/2020)- fits most monitoring scenarios
  • S3 Storage Lens advanced metrics and recommendations: $0.20 per million objects monitored per month — important note: this is per Dashboard
  • As mentioned in AWS blog post — every customer will receive 1 default dashboard

Note: Account must have at least 1 S3 bucket for dashboard to be created

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3. AWS Blog Post — Introducing Amazon S3 Storage Lens — Organization-wide Visibility Into Object Storage

Note: To be able to view S3 buckets in all accounts, you must first enable trusted access to authorize Storage Lens to access your AWS organization hierarchy.

4. AWS Documentation page

Summary:

Every Architect will recognize the benefits of using S3 Storage Lens:

  1. Single point of view for organizational buckets. In addition you can configure separate Dashboards for Logging account, per OU, and/or per account -it is very flexible.
  2. Different views with filters by Account, Region, Storage Class, Bucket

3. Ability to export Metrics

4. With Advanced Metrics you have the option of prefix aggregation — (where did those 10 TB of data go?)

5. And, don’t forget you have the ability to see incomplete MPU (Multipart uploads) metrics — detecting it may save you a lot of money

6. Find if something is not encrypted

7. Forgotten versioned objects?

8. Bubble analysis —still trying to figure out how we can benefit from this, but it’s really cool 😄

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