Cutting-Edge Innovation, Yet No Simple Way to See Your S3 Storage Size?

I understand your frustration, but I want to clarify that there are actually several straightforward ways to view your S3 storage size and manage your costs effectively without necessarily incurring additional charges.

Amazon S3 provides multiple built-in tools to help you understand and optimize your storage usage:

1. S3 Storage Lens: This is a comprehensive analytics solution that provides organization-wide visibility into your object storage usage and activity trends. It's designed to help you optimize costs and apply data protection best practices. The default dashboard is updated daily and is available to all S3 customers at no additional cost. It includes metrics on storage usage and can help identify cost-saving opportunities.

2. Amazon S3 Console: You can use the S3 console to calculate the total size and number of objects in a bucket. This is a simple, direct method that doesn't require enabling additional features.

3. CloudWatch: S3 metrics are automatically sent to CloudWatch, where you can view your bucket size and number of objects. While CloudWatch records these metrics once per day, it's a readily available option for monitoring your storage.

4. S3 Inventory: This feature provides reports of your objects and their metadata, which can be useful for verifying encryption and replication status, as well as identifying objects for S3 Batch Operations.

These tools are designed to make it easier for you to manage your S3 storage and costs without necessarily requiring complex setups or additional fees. The default S3 Storage Lens dashboard, for instance, provides 28 usage metrics and 14 days of historical data at no extra charge.

For more advanced needs, there are indeed additional features you can enable, such as advanced metrics in S3 Storage Lens or using S3 Inventory with Athena for detailed analysis. However, these are optional and designed for users with more complex requirements.

Regarding cleanup policies and retention strategies, S3 offers lifecycle policies that can automatically transition objects to lower-cost storage tiers or delete them after a specified time. These can be set up easily through the S3 console or API and can significantly help in managing costs.

While AWS continues to innovate and add advanced features, they do provide these straightforward tools to address the common use case of monitoring storage size and costs. The challenge often lies in knowing which tools are available and how to best use them for your specific needs.
Sources
Calculate Amazon S3 bucket size and number of objects | AWS re:Post
Assessing your storage activity and usage with Amazon S3 Storage Lens - Amazon Simple Storage Service
S3 Storage Analytics and Insights – Amazon S3
Amazon S3 Features – Storage Lens – AWS