The TierPilot Blog

S3 economics, storage internals, and hard-won lessons in cost optimization.

Deep dive

The Engineer's Guide to S3 Storage Classes and Cost Optimization (2026)

S3 Standard is 23x more expensive than Deep Archive. This guide breaks down every S3 storage class, the retrieval-fee traps, why Intelligent-Tiering isn't a silver bullet, and how to tier objects based on real access patterns.

TierPilot Engineering · June 30, 2026 · 12 min read

Analysis

Why S3 Intelligent-Tiering Isn't Enough (And What To Do Instead)

Intelligent-Tiering charges monitoring fees per object, ignores retrieval cost modeling, and won't touch the archive tiers unless you opt in. Here's where it falls short and how access-pattern-driven tiering does better.

TierPilot Engineering · July 8, 2026 · 7 min read