CODEWITHSUNDEEP
amazon-s3
Joseph Victor
Joseph Victor

Reputation: 829

What is the storage cost of an empty key on S3

Suppose I upload a zero length object to S3 and then walk away. Will I be charged (monthly) for storing it, besides the initial put? Or is the metadata for that object "free".

Upvotes: 1

Views: 1103

Answers (3)

Aleksei Poliakov
Aleksei Poliakov

Reputation: 65

No, you will not be charged for storage.

To test this I created a million empty objects in Standard storage inside an empty tagged bucket and then filter the S3 costs for that bucket using Cost Explorer - on the day when objects were created the "Requests-Tier1" cost was 5$ (which makes perfect sense since you pay 0.005$ per 1,000 requests) - but subsequent days the S3 cost for that bucket was 0.

Interestingly enough looking at the bucket in Metrics displays a non-zero "Total bucket size" of ~85MB - so at this scale the cost just rounds to zero anyway. Given that the cost of Standard storage is $0.023 per GB - to get billed 1 cent you have to have ~445MB worth of data - which is about 5 million objects. Then I crated another 5 million objects in the bucket, making the total number of objects 6 million and the bucket size at 491MB - but I still wasn't charge 1 cent, so I am pretty sure that empty objects are free.

Upvotes: 3

Gary Fernie
Gary Fernie

Reputation: 21

The Amazon documentation is not clear on this, but there are a few things that lead me to assume that zero-length objects accrue storage costs.

  1. The S3 Billing FAQs mention that metadata is included in storage costs.

The volume of storage billed in a month is based on the average storage used throughout the month. This includes all object data and metadata stored in buckets that you created under your AWS account.

https://aws.amazon.com/s3/faqs/#Billing

  1. Metadata includes mandatory system-defined fields, such as ETag and the LastModified timestamp.

There are two kinds of metadata in Amazon S3: system-defined metadata and user-defined metadata.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/UsingMetadata.html

  1. Even delete markers, which are comparable to zero-length objects, are charged for the storage of their key name.

Delete markers accrue a nominal charge for storage in Amazon S3. The storage size of a delete marker is equal to the size of the key name of the delete marker. A key name is a sequence of Unicode characters. The UTF-8 encoding adds 1–4 bytes of storage to your bucket for each character in the name.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/DeleteMarker.html

Upvotes: 1

jellycsc
jellycsc

Reputation: 12259

You will likely be changed for one PUT/POST request which is about $0.000005

Upvotes: 1

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