Unpacking Amazon S3 Express One Zone: Balancing Low Latency with Costs

Amazon S3 Express One Zone, introduced at the 2023 AWS re:Invent conference, is a new storage class designed for latency-sensitive applications, offering ten times better performance than S3 Standard and providing consistent single-digit millisecond latency. It operates within a single Availability Zone (AZ) and is particularly suitable for frequently accessed data or demanding applications, with a capacity to handle hundreds of thousands of transactions per second. Despite its high performance, S3 Express One Zone's storage costs are significantly higher—approximately seven times—than those of S3 Standard, though request costs are reduced by 50%. The community response to the new storage class is mixed, with some users appreciating the performance improvements and others concerned about its cost implications, especially given the need for manually replicating data to avoid single-AZ failures. Overall, while S3 Express One Zone offers notable latency improvements, its higher costs may deter some users, and its adoption will depend on specific use cases and data access patterns.