Latency?

[scw]

An attribute that is useful for comparison is the retrieval time for data. Because of the variance involved, it isn't possible to make precise claims, but it's still useful to know the order of magnitude (ms vs sec). For example, Glacier takes hours to restore, Google Nearline takes seconds, or milliseconds for S3.

[gaul]

I like this idea but it is hard to compare across providers. Only Glacier seems to give a 3-5 hour SLA and I cannot find references for nearline. Basically anything that uses erasure encoding instead of replicas should be nearline on the order of seconds to minutes.