S3 Lifecycle Policies and Storage Classes Practical

Lifecycle rules

If we had to select every object individually to configure their storage classes, it would require too much manual overhead. This is where lifecycle rules come in. In S3, we can configure lifecycle rules to automatically move files to infrequent access and archive storage tiers after a certain period.

• Transition actions: We can define these actions in lifecycle policies that move our objects to different storage classes. For example, we can move objects to S3 Standard-IA after 30 days or to Glacier Flexible Retrieval after 180 days.

• Expiration actions: We can define these actions in lifecycle policies that permanently delete objects after a certain period. For example, we can create a rule to delete noncurrent versions of objects after 365 days.

Using lifecycle configuration rules, we can tell S3 to move objects to cheaper storage classes or archive or delete them.

The AWS website image shows that we can only use lifecycle rules to transition objects downward to cheaper storage classes. We can’t set them up to move the objects from a lower to a higher-tier class.