Glacier-style cold storage

DesignHard45 minAmazon style

Your task

Design a Glacier-style archival cold-storage system optimized for cheapest-possible long-term retention of rarely-read data: think compliance archives and backups, write-once and read-almost-never, eleven-nines durability, and retrieval latency of minutes-to-hours being acceptable. The trick is that storage cost must be a fraction of hot object storage. How do you achieve that cost while keeping data durable and (eventually) retrievable?

It covers

  • Archival
  • Erasure coding
  • Retrieval latency