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S3 Bucket Sizes

Amazon S3 buckets are essential for object storage in AWS, but without visibility into bucket sizes and storage costs, organizations can accumulate significant expenses over time. Our detection algorithm identifies your largest S3 buckets and provides a detailed cost breakdown by storage class.

What We Analyze

The S3 bucket size analysis scans your buckets and reports on:

  • Total bucket size in GB and TB
  • Monthly and annual storage costs
  • Storage class breakdown (Standard, Intelligent-Tiering, Glacier, etc.)
  • Regional distribution of your data

Storage Classes Monitored

We track usage across all major S3 storage classes:

Storage Class Typical Use Case Approx. Cost/GB/Month
Standard Frequently accessed data $0.023
Standard-IA Infrequent access $0.0125
One Zone-IA Infrequent access, single AZ $0.01
Intelligent-Tiering Unknown/changing access patterns $0.023
Glacier Instant Retrieval Archive, millisecond retrieval $0.01
Glacier Flexible Retrieval Archive, minutes to hours retrieval $0.004
Glacier Deep Archive Long-term archive $0.00099

Optimization Opportunities

By understanding your S3 bucket sizes and storage distribution, you can:

  1. Identify large buckets that may benefit from lifecycle policies
  2. Optimize storage classes by moving infrequently accessed data to cheaper tiers
  3. Clean up unused data that accumulates over time
  4. Set up S3 Intelligent-Tiering for buckets with unpredictable access patterns
  5. Implement lifecycle rules to automatically transition or expire objects

Detection Details

  • Analyzes up to 200 buckets per account
  • Returns the top 5 largest buckets by default
  • Uses CloudWatch metrics for accurate size measurements
  • Respects whitelist tags to exclude specific buckets
  • Provides regional breakdown since S3 buckets are region-specific

What You Get

For each bucket identified, the system provides:

  • Bucket name and region
  • Total size in bytes, GB, and TB
  • Storage breakdown by storage class
  • Monthly cost estimate based on storage distribution
  • Annual cost projection
  • Custom tags for organizational tracking

Regular monitoring of S3 bucket sizes helps organizations maintain visibility into their storage footprint and identify opportunities for cost optimization through storage class transitions, lifecycle policies, and data cleanup initiatives.