AWS S3 Storage Lens: The Best Service Not Announced at AWS Storage Day

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Pete: Hello, welcome to AWS Morning Brief. I am Pete Cheslock, and I am here yet again with Jesse DeRose.

Jesse: Hello. 

Pete: We here to talk about the best service announced not during AWS Storage Day 2020.

Jesse: So, close.

Pete: So, close, though. It was announced a few days after, and that is the AWS S3 Storage Lens service, which I think I've got that naming right. I know sometimes it's ‘AWS thing,’ sometimes it's ‘Amazon thing,’ and to be honest, I never know which is which. 

Jesse: Yeah.

Pete: AWS S3 Storage Lens is honestly one of the best new services that I've seen out, released thus far. I guess we're still pre-re:Invent announcements in a lot of this stuff. But what it is is a—from their site it says, “S3 Storage Lens delivers organization-wide visibility into object storage usage, activity trends,” blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, marketing speak. Basically, it allows you to get a view of your S3 usage across accounts. Which, that's mindblowing, right?

Jesse: Yeah. This feature has so much potential; I'm really excited to see where they go with it.

Pete: Yeah. And so when I first saw this blog post on Amazon’s site talking about it, my mind just started going crazy because again, we work in Duckbill Group as cloud economists with a lot of different clients, and because Amazon organizations may be the reason why, made it very easy to spin up new accounts, maybe also the adage, the design principle of creating many Amazon accounts to kind of segment workloads or to provide you to—segment your workloads in a way for cost reasoning or security reasons. But all of those things—somewhat related, somewhat not—have caused a lot of our clients to have lots of Amazon accounts. I mean, you could see hundreds, in some cases, of Amazon accounts. 

And the issue that I've always kind of had, and especially an issue we deal with in helping our clients analyze their costs and optimize their costs is how do you aggregate S3 usage? Because S3 is normally in the top five of services that we see in usage, how do you pull that together? And I guess we do that a lot of different ways. Jesse, maybe you can chat a little bit about what are some of the ways that we try to analyze this spend currently?

Jesse: Yeah. Pete, I think I'm really excited about this feature because AWS already offers aggregate looks at metrics for other top services by spend. Like, for EC2, you've got Compute Optimizer. We don't have anything for RDS yet, but I feel like that might be not far off, given Compute Optimizer’s existence. And we already have other tools that allow you to look across multiple accounts to look at metrics, especially if you're looking at Cost Explorer, for example, you can see metrics across multiple accounts, you can see spend across multiple accounts. 

So, I feel like this makes sense. I'm really excited to see that you can look at all of your S3 storage metrics in one place because right now, the only way that we're able to get any kind of representation of S3 usage is through Cost Explorer. And there are ways that you can go about filtering and slicing that data to get usage information and certain metrics, slicing and dicing on different filters for accounts and cost allocation tags, but it's all at the bucket level, or at the usage level, and if you really want to dig in deeper, you don't have a lot of options.

Pete: Yeah, it's a service that they're operating on your behalf. So, your only insight is what they give you insight into. Maybe some of that is CloudWatch metrics, there's obviously the S3 storage analytics that can give you some idea in your storage—based on access—that can help you kind of optimize, but nothing really again at the—ability to see it across multiple accounts is I think, really the big game-changer too.

Jesse: And I think what's really amazing here is that the majority of metrics that they're offering are free. And we'll get into that in a minute, but I'm really impressed that so many of these metrics are shared free of charge. You just have to turn it on. And then you have access to all of this great information that you can work with. 

Pete: Yeah. I think that's a great point that we haven't mentioned yet, that this is—the basic form of this is free. And the metrics that you can get are pretty useful in the free tier. Also, this is actually something that is turned on in your account right now. If you have an Amazon account, go into S3, it's actually under S3, it'll be on the left-hand column—at least it should be unless they go move stuff around—but you'll see a drop-down for Storage Lens, and you'll see an option for dashboards. 

And when you go into the dashboards, there will be a default dashboard already pre-configured with the free metrics enabled for your account. Now, that could be super helpful if, let's say, you just have one account, you can get some real good high-level metrics around your storage based on bucket. You can go into that dashboard and really quickly see total storage across all your buckets. You can see trend analysis with, day-by-day, week-by-week change comparison, how are things growing. There was one thing that I saw that I was really blown away by because this is something we deal with a lot is they have broken the metrics out in kind of a high-level summary, focusing on data protection, like being able to see data percentage replicated or encrypted, but also based on cost efficiency, too, being able to see if you have versioning enabled, obviously, there's a cost for that. 

How many old versions of this thing do you have, but also incomplete multipart uploads? That is potentially a large and in many ways, super hidden cost for some users of Amazon S3. If you are uploading a multipart file, and it fails, it lives in this purgatory, storage purgatory, where you're charged for it, but you may not see it in an obvious way. 

Jesse: And we see that with a lot of our clients who have multipart uploads and end up with these incomplete multipart uploads that just take up space. There's no clear metrics right now, prior to Storage Lens, that say, here's all of this stale multi-part upload usage that you're paying for, that's effectively just taking up wasted space. But now we have metrics for that; now we have information that can clearly tell us where they are, how much space they're taking, and you can actually do something about it.

Pete: Right. Yeah, it gives you this intelligence that you can act upon. To talk about those metrics, since we're kind of on that stage, when ...