AWS launched S3 Intelligent-Tiering two years ago, creating a storage class that enabled customers to automatically select the most cost-effective storage tier based on usage patterns. AWS S3 Intelligent-Tiering also automatically optimises the customer’s storage costs for data with unknown or changing access patterns.

AWS recently announced that they would add two new archive access tiers — Archive Access tier and Deep Archive Access tier — which are specifically designed for asynchronous access optimised for rare access at a very low cost. These optimisations will automatically archive objects that are rare accessed, which helps reduce storage costs by up to 95%. Find out more about how the new tiers work here.