AWS announces a new service called Amazon S3 Storage Lens, which can provide customers with organization-wide visibility into their object storage usage and activity trends. With the service, they can understand what happens across their S3 Object Storage installations.
The S3 team with AWS built Amazon S3 Storage Lens to provide customers a cloud storage analytics solution with actionable recommendations to improve cost-efficiency and apply data protection best practices. Before the service launch, users had to manage S3 buckets individually – a challenge for heavy users. As Amazon principal developer advocate Martin Beeby wrote in an AWS blog post on Amazon S3 Storage Lens:
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.
Source: https://aws.amazon.com/s3/storage-analytics-insights/
Customers can use S3 Storage Lens with the Amazon S3 API, CLI, or in the S3 Console. Through the S3 Console, they can leverage the interactive dashboard and enable administrators to perform filtering and drill-down into metrics to show how and where S3 storage is used. Furthermore, the metrics are organized into categories like cost-efficiency and data protection. Customers can also export metrics in CSV or Parquet format to an S3 bucket of their choice for further analysis with tools such as Amazon Athena, Amazon QuickSight, Amazon Redshift, or others.
A respondent on a Reddit thread about Amazon S3 Storage Lens stated:
It's in AWS's interest to give customers this kind of visibility of what is costing them. It's no use for them if customers have bill shock after a few months in the cloud and decide to move workloads back on-prem. A happy customer is a long-term customer. A customer that resents paying the bill because they don't understand why it's so high will move away as soon as they can.
Also, Holger Mueller, principal analyst and vice president at Constellation Research Inc., told InfoQ:
Once the observability/management/analytics tools are getting introduced for a successful cloud service - you know that cloud service has matured and 'arrived' in enterprises. This is undoubtedly the case for Amazon's S3 storage service, and it is good to see AWS giving customers better visibility into what is happening in their S3 clusters. As with all new services, we now have to see if AWS has hit the mark with first adopters of Storage Lens.
Currently, Amazon S3 Storage Lens is available in almost every commercial AWS Region. The service has two tiers. The free tier automatically available for all S3 customers contains 15 usage-related metrics and an advanced Metrics option, which has an additional cost; however, it includes the full 29 usage and activity metrics with 15-month data retention and contextual recommendations. More details on pricing are available on the pricing page under Management & Analytics and further details of the service itself on the documentation page.
