What are the two primary components of Amazon Glacier?

Amazon Glacier, now integrated into Amazon S3 Glacier, is designed for long-term data storage and archival. The two primary components of Amazon Glacier are archives and vaults.

Archives refer to the individual data items that you store in Glacier. Each archive can range from a few bytes to several terabytes of data. When you upload data to Glacier, it is stored as a single archive, making it a straightforward way to manage large datasets that don't require frequent access.

Vaults, on the other hand, serve as containers for storing multiple archives. Each vault can hold many archives and is used to organize and protect your stored data. The architecture allows for easy management of large amounts of archived data, providing both a level of organization and safeguards against data loss.

This design differentiates Glacier from other storage offerings like Amazon S3, where the concept of buckets is used instead. In the context of Glacier's architecture, archives allow for the individual storage of data, and vaults provide structure and management capabilities for those archives.