AWS Launches Amazon S3 Storage Lens To Improve Object Storage Visibility

Himanshu Khanna

2 months ago

Amazon Web Services has launched its S3 Storage Lens to improve organization-wide visibility into object storage for delivering contextual recommendations. As a company begins adopting cloud, the number of S3 buckets can be small, but over time these few S3 buckets may turn into thousands of accounts spread over multiple AWS Regions. According to Amazon, S3 Storage Lens is the first cloud storage analytics solution that provides users with a single view of the accounts being used in the organization.

Amazon S3 stores large shared data sets across numerous accounts, making it difficult for the organization to understand their storage, which hampers their ability to optimize cost or improve security posture. Amazon states that S3 Storage Lens solves this issue by allowing users to generate insight about their storage at the account, bucket, or prefix level. S3 Lens comes with 15 usage metrics for previous S3 users at no extra cost, and can also be upgraded to the advanced tier for more than 29 usage metrics, contextual recommendations, 15-month data retention, and prefix aggregations.

Amazon claims that these metrics make it possible to take immediate actions based on recommendations. These metrics are organized into multiple categories like cost efficiency and data protection. The S3 Lens comes with an interactive dashboard that can be accessed in the S3 console itself. Due to a large number of accounts, all the customers get a default dashboard capable of being updated to work with other analysis tools like Amazon Athena, Amazon Redshift, etc.

Martin Beeb, the Principal Developer Advocate for AWS, spoke about the launch, stating, “a customer may have tens or even hundreds of accounts and have multiple S3 buckets across numerous AWS Regions. Customers managing these sorts of environments have told us that they find it difficult to understand how storage is used across their organization, optimize their costs, and improve security posture.”

Amazon also claims that the early response for S3 Storage Lens has been positive. Its users include Pinterest, Snowflake, and Veeva. According to Yi Yin, a software engineer at Pinterest, “S3 Storage Lens will enhance our visibility into our storage usage, and help us continuously optimize our storage costs. We use the organization-wide view to see aggregated storage usage for our teams across multiple regions, and then drill-down to understand storage growth on a bucket or even prefix level. Using S3 Storage Lens, we can then create different dashboards for different internal teams, so they self-serve to find ways to optimize storage costs by using a Lifecyle policy or transitioning data to a more cost-effective storage class.”