Archiving to S3 Glacier cost me more than it saved

Through my own ignorance I cost myself an unnecessarily $3.00 month. Three bucks a month is nothing you say ? In terms of AWS misconfigs leading to unneeded costs I would agree. But I learned from my mistake

I learned that it is more expensive to store CloudTrail Logs in Standard S3 and then transition them to S3-Glacier than to just keep your CloudTrail logs stored in Standard S3. I also gained

1. Awareness that every 1000 Objects transitioned from S3-Standard to S3-Glacier costs 5 cents.
2. ClouldTrail was logging about 2000+ events per day in my enviroment.
3. It cost me 10 cents/day to transition these to S3 Glacier or an extra $3.00 month

How do you verify if your S3 bucket is transitioning CloudTrail Logs to S3-Glacier ?

1. Go into CloudTrail and note the S3 Bucket where your CloudTrail logs are being stored

2. Then move over to S3, find your S3 Bucket where CT logs are stored select it, and then click on the Management tab

So in my scenario I was transitioning my CloudTrail logs to S3-Glacier every 90 days. I want to remove this lifecycle rule. Evaluate if this is appropriate for your use case. Cost may not be the only reason you’re archiving to S3-Glacier.

In summary, if you’re archiving to S3-Glacier solely to reduce cost keep in mind not only the cost to archive but also the pricing to move objects from where-ever they’re stored to S3-Glacier and the cost to retrieve that data