Objects come in all shapes and sizes. Cloud storage services such as Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, and Azure Blob are popular because they are flexible, easy to use, cost effective, and meet the requirements of virtually every storage workload out there. These object storage services were created to handle a wide array of storage needs while managing the number of times your data is accessed, updated, requested or retrieved.
And yet, these options don’t serve well for some key edge use cases because they simply were not built for them. One example we’ve seen from a number of Momento customers is object storage for a high volume of small objects, particularly when those small objects are short-lived or infrequently accessed. Because object storage services like Amazon S3 and Google Cloud Storage charge per number of requests, the PUT/GET charges for a large number of small files balloon quickly.
Momento Serverless Cache changes this. It’s deployable on SSD-backed instances and is fine-tuned to boost performance for workloads just like these. Combining the performance increase from the higher bandwidths and immediate data transfer of SSDs with greatly reduced PUT/GET costs is a win-win—faster object store at a lower total cost.
One Momento customer was storing small objects for a week and realized PUT requests accounted for 97% of their S3 bill for the workload. Moving this workload to Momento Serverless Cache provided this customer with lower latencies on SSDs while also reducing their total cost by 54%.
Let’s look at a hypothetical situation to further illustrate how Momento can make object storage PUT/GET more affordable.
Scenario: A photo sharing app that stores millions of thumbnail images per day
Object storage service workload specs
Let’s assume each thumbnail file is 8 KB in size, the files are retained for 7 days, there are 2,000 writes per second, and 1,000 reads per second. The 2,000 writes per second is equivalent to 5.184 billion PUTs (41,472 GB) per month and the 1,000 reads per second is equivalent to 2.592 billion GETs (20,736 GB) per month.
Calculating object storage service costs
Now it’s time to compare costs between services, which begins with understanding their pricing models. The following assume the US-East Northern Virginia region.
Amazon S3 Standard
- PUT, COPY, POST and LIST: $0.005 per 1,000 requests
- GET and SELECT: $0.0004 per 1,000 requests
Google Cloud Storage
- PUT: $0.05 per 10,000 requests
- GET: $0.004 per 10,000 requests
Momento Serverless Cache
- $0.15 per GB of data transferred to/from Momento (with the first 50GB free each month)
Let’s start with Amazon S3. With 5.184 billion PUT requests over the span of a 30-day month, the PUT cost will be $25,920 per month. The 2.592 billion GET requests per month sum up to $1,036.80. That brings the total to $26,956.80 in PUT/GET costs per month for Amazon S3.
For Google Cloud Storage, the main difference is that transactions are priced per 10,000, but the decimal shifts the opposite direction in the dollar amount, meaning the result is the exact same as Amazon S3: $26,956.80 of PUT/GET charges per month.
Momento Serverless Cache is priced based on data transferred, so we need to use the GB per month conversion from the chart above for this calculation. It’s $0.15/GB of data transferred to and from Momento (with the first 50GB free), which yields a monthly cost of only $9,323.70. This is a 65% savings on PUT/GET charges alone!
Bottom line: Momento Serverless Cache is a faster and more cost-effective object storage service
It’s clear that storage use cases with a high volume of small, short-lived files can rack up huge PUT/GET costs from Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage. Momento Serverless Cache—an SSD-backed, persistent, and cost-effective object storage service—alleviates this pain without sacrificing the performance you expect.
Momento customers are saving more than 50% on their total storage cost—all while improving performance. Contact us today to find out how much you could save.
If you’re looking to streamline billing and leverage existing commitments, Momento is also available on AWS Marketplace.
