Amazon Glacier is an online storage service intended to provide durable and secure long-term storage for the purposes of archiving and backup of large amounts of data. Glacier is lower cost than the other Amazon storage offerings, primarily because it's optimized for infrequent access.
Amazon Glacier is an online storage service offered as part of Amazon Web Services.
Glacier is intended to provide durable and secure long-term storage for the purposes of archiving and backing up of larger amounts of data, ultimately intended to compete with backup and storage systems that companies often must maintain.
It is differentiated from the other storage offerings from Amazon - S3 (Simple Storage Service) and EBS (Elastic Block Store) - in that it's designed for extremely infrequent access of the data stored inside its 'Vaults', whereas those services are designed such that objects stored inside them are highly available to be manipulated and/or served in real-time to Amazon EC2 servers (in the case of EBS), or web clients (in the case of S3).
Glacier is significantly lower cost than the other Amazon storage offerings, primarily because it's optimized for infrequent retrievals of data, however the delay period between requesting a data retrieval and the 'Vault' content becoming available makes it unsuitable for real-time use as a storage system.
