CASE 16 · LATTICE · 2025
Four petabytes of S3, half the bill.
A geospatial analytics company had four petabytes of raster imagery in S3, growing 50TB a month. Everything was Standard. The bill was $94k a month and rising. We mapped actual access patterns, ran a lifecycle migration, and dropped storage cost 51% without touching application code.
Geospatial analytics
COST
2025
RESULTS
What changed, by the numbers.
STORAGE BILL
−51%
DATA REORGANISED
4 PB
p50 ACCESS LATENCY
< 1s
RETRIEVAL COST
+3%
HOW IT WENT
S3 Storage Lens gave us the truth: 78% of the imagery hadn’t been read in 90 days. 92% hadn’t been read in 180 days. The data was kept because customers might query it eventually — and a few did, occasionally, on the long tail.
We modelled lifecycle policies against the actual access histogram. Standard → Intelligent Tiering for the active 22%. Glacier Instant Retrieval for the 90-day tail. Glacier Deep Archive for anything not touched in a year. Crucially, no application code changed — the Lambda that fetched imagery already handled retries on RestoreObject.
The bill dropped 51% by month two. The increase in retrieval fees turned out to be 3%, well under our modelled ceiling of 8%. Customer-facing latency was unchanged. We left the team a Storage Lens dashboard and a quarterly review process so the same drift doesn’t happen again.
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