S3 Lifecycle Rules

Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is an economical object storage solution. However, since it is mostly used for backups, logs, and archives, data can quickly pile up and incur a large cost. We have already discussed that S3 offers a suite of storage options tailored to meet the required latency at a minimal cost. Using the right storage solution for the use case, enterprises and developers can considerably save their storage costs.

But what if our data access requirements vary? For example, consider a software application that stores logs on an S3 bucket and requires them frequently for a week. After that, we can delete them. Similarly, some documents might require frequent access in the initial few weeks or months and would be rarely accessed as time passes by. In such a situation, it can be a hassle to manually transmit objects between multiple storage classes to optimize cost.

To automate the transitioning between the storage classes or deletion of objects based on the configurations, S3 provides S3 Lifecycles. An S3 Lifecycle Configuration is a set of rules that defines when to transmit an object or delete it. There are two types of S3 Configuration rules:

• Transition: These rules define the transition of objects between different storage classes.

• Expiration: These rules define the deletion of objects from a storage class.

We can configure S3 Lifecycles by determining the access frequency of the objects in the bucket. To facilitate developers determine the access patterns of objects in a bucket, S3 provides two options:

• S3 Storage lens: Storage lens works at the AWS organization level, the highest level in the hierarchy, all the way down to the account level, bucket level, and even prefix level. We can use it to get a snapshot of the number of buckets in an organization, the ...