Organizations tend to think of data storage as an ancillary service and do not optimize storage after data is moved to the cloud. Many also fail to clean up unused storage and let these services run for days, weeks, and even months at significant cost. According to this blog post by RightScale, up to 7% of all cloud spend is wasted on unused storage volumes and old snapshots (copies of storage volumes). AWS offers a broad and flexible set of data storage options that let you move between different tiers of storage and change storage types at any time. This whitepaper discusses how to choose AWS storage services that meet your data storage needs at the lowest cost. It also discusses how to optimize these services to achieve balance between performance, availability, and durability.
