Amazon S3 was introduced in 2006, and it was a game-changer in the cloud storage industry.
It was the first cloud storage service that was widely adopted by businesses and individuals.
In 2012 Amazon introduced Amazon Glacier, a low-cost storage service that was designed for data archiving and backup.
It was completely separate storage with a different API and completely different data access model.
This is why FastGlacier was created - to provide a convenient way to manage Amazon Glacier storage.
In 2014 Amazon introduced the GLACIER storage class for Amazon S3, allowing to use Glacier storage directly from S3 API.
The active phase of Amazon Glacier development was between the years 2012 and 2015, where Amazon introduced
a lot of improvements and new features for the service.
In 2016 Amazon introduced additional retrieval options for Glacier, allowing to retrieve data faster than before.
And in 2017 the most recent improvement for Glacier was introduced - the S3 Select feature, which allows to retrieve
only the necessary parts of the data stored in Glacier, without the need to restore the whole archive.
There were no significant improvements for Amazon Glacier since 2017, and it is unlikely that Amazon
will invest in the development of this service in the future.
Instead they focus on the development of cold storage classes for Amazon S3:
-
Glacier Instant Retrieval
-
Glacier Flexible Retrieval(formerly Glacier)
-
Glacier Deep Archive
These storage classes are designed to replace Glacier, and they provide a
more convenient and cheaper way to store data for long-term archiving and backup.
All Amazon S3 cold storage classes are accessible through the Amazon S3 API,
and you can
use S3 Browser to manage your data stored under these storage classes.
We do not plan to release new versions of FastGlacier in the future,
and are able to provide very limited support for the existing versions of the software.
We recommend using S3 Browser instead.
