Glacier melt race increases vastly … for AWS cold storage

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has made a few price cut announcements a few days out from its Re:Invent shindig in Las Vegas.

The cloud colossus has cut the price of its S3 storage, which now kicks in at US$0.0230/GB/month. Reductions range from depending on volume of data stored and the region you store it in.

The company's cold storage service, Glacier, has created a new and more costly retrieval service but it looks like decent value because it offers faster restore times.

The current three-to-five-hour restore time service is now “Standard retrieval” and costs $0.01 per GB along with $0.05 for every 1,000 requests.

There's now also “Expedited retrieval” that delivers data in one to five minutes. AWS points out that unless you plan to store more than 100TB, “S3’s Infrequent Access storage class can be a better value than” the $0.03 per GB and $0.01 per request for Expedited retrievals.

Big downloaders can now choose “Bulk retrieval” with a five-to-twelve-hour retrieval time at $0.0025 per GB and a $0.025 fee for every 1,000 requests.

Amazon's also done something interesting to its WorkSpaces desktop-as-a-service, which can now run in a web browser.

WorkSpaces previously relied on a client application that runs on Windows, Mac OS, iOS, Android, Chrome OS and Amazon.com' own Fire tablets. Adding web access means WorkSpaces can now run on Linux. Or anything else that can run Firefox 49 or Chrome 53.

That browser requirement means the Raspberry Pi is probably still off limits as a WorkSpaces client, damning your correspondent's dream of doling out cheap desktops-by-the-hour to his kids.

Which won't stop us from having a whirl at this on a resident rPi 3. Watch this space. ®