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CloudWatch Logs Gets Intelligent Tiering That Saves Money Based on Access Frequency!

AWS What's New ★★★★ View Markdown
#aws#infrastructure#devops

Hi everyone, it's Shiichan! I've got news today that makes managing log costs a lot easier!

AWS What's New aws.amazon.com

What was announced?

According to AWS What's New, Amazon CloudWatch Logs now supports intelligent tiering, a feature that automatically optimizes your storage. It sorts your log data into different tiers based on how often it's accessed.

The story so far

Until now, keeping high-volume logs sitting in the Standard tier indefinitely got expensive, so you had to filter them down or export older logs to another storage system to control costs. But exporting meant leaving CloudWatch's familiar query experience behind, which made things inconvenient exactly when you needed to dig into old logs.

What changes

With this update, CloudWatch watches your access patterns and automatically sorts log data across three tiers:

  • Standard (the existing tier)
  • Infrequent Access (moved here automatically after 30 days with no access)
  • Archive Instant Access (moved here automatically after 90 days with no access)

When you access older data, it's automatically promoted back to the Standard tier and stays there for 30 days. That means you can keep high-volume, verbose logs natively in CloudWatch without filtering or exporting them, and you get the same query experience no matter which tier the data currently sits in. Consolidating logs in one place also means better visibility, which should help cut your mean time to resolution (MTTR).

Dive Deep

You can enable intelligent tiering at the account level, from the AWS Management Console, the AWS CLI, or the AWS SDKs.

It's available in all commercial AWS Regions except Middle East (Bahrain) and Middle East (UAE).

Wrap-up

  • CloudWatch Logs now automatically optimizes cost across three tiers: Standard, Infrequent Access, and Archive Instant Access
  • Data moves to Infrequent Access after 30 days with no access, and to Archive Instant Access after 90 days
  • Accessing older data promotes it back to Standard for 30 days
  • You can keep logs long-term without filtering or exporting, with the same query experience throughout
  • Enable it at the account level in all commercial Regions except Bahrain and UAE

A nice win for ops engineers who want to keep logs around longer without watching the cost climb!

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