I don't like how the title and article reads like a hit piece on Amazon Glacier. It's great at what it is intended for. In addition it seems he still saved money because over 3 years because the $9 a month savings added up to more than the $150 bill for retrieval.

I'm surprised that this aspect has not been mentioned here in the comments yet:

> I was initiating the same 150 retrievals, over and over again, in the same order.

This was the actual problem that resulted in the large cost.

At my old job we would get a lot of complaints about overage charges based on usage to our paid API. It wasn't as complicated of pricing as a lot of AWS services, just x req / month and $0.0x per req after that, but every billing cycle someone would complain that we overcharged them. We would then look through our logs to confirm they had indeed made the requests and provide the client with these logs.