The new AWS S3 Express One Zone low latency storage class is making waves in the data infrastructure community with its 50% cheaper individual API operations compared to S3 Standard, but it comes at a cost of 8x more per GiB stored. This makes it less suitable as a primary store for big data systems like Kafka and traditional data lakes. However, it opens up an exciting opportunity for modern data infrastructure to tune individual workloads for low latency and higher cost or higher latency and lower cost with the same architecture and code. The new storage class can be used to build completely object storage-based systems with data tiering performed between object storage tiers, potentially reducing costs by an order of magnitude for high volume use cases without touching a line of code. While the initial cost is still high, it's not a non-issue as data can be easily landed into low latency S3 Express buckets and compacted out to S3 Standard buckets asynchronously.