Is Amazon S3 Glacier Storage the same as using the Amazon Glacier Service Directly?

Question

My doubt is the title of my question:

I'm studying AWS, and I'm not understanding if when we use the S3 Glacier Storage, are we then using the Amazon Glacier Service or is the Glacier Storage Service just a property of Amazon S3?

Answer 1

Yes.

Data from an S3 bucket can copy data into Glacier archive storage. This is exactly the same as using a Glacier storage archive directly behind the scenes.

When using the lifecycle properties of an S3 bucket and creating an archive, you are using both services together. They have different use-cases, speed & access capabilities, and pricing. They work together very seamlessly, but are in fact separate services.

You can take a look at the Amazon S3 FAQ's Amazon Glacier section to get some additional info.

With that being said: be aware that if you archive FROM S3 to Glacier then you'll be using only the S3 APIs to access the Glacier archive. They are still in fact different services, but when you perform an archive operation from an S3 bucket it creates a mapping for you. However, if you create an archive directly in Glacier bypassing S3, then you can use the separate Glacier API.