How To Enable Lifecycle Management In S3 Bucket Using AWS Portal

Introduction

In the previous article, we have learned how to create the S3 bucket and store the objects in bucket.

In this article, we will explore the S3 bucket feature, Lifecycle Management.

Lifecycle management can be used to optimize storage costs which help to maintain S3 volumes. You can set a lifecycle transition policy to automatically move objects stored in S3 Standard to S3 Standard-IA, S3 One Zone –IA, Glacier.

You can also set the lifecycle expiration policy to automatically delete the object after a specified number of days.

To set up the lifecycle policy there is no additional cost involved.

Let’s see an example, you have stored an object in the S3 standard bucket and after 30 days you will not access this object frequently. So you can move this object to S3 Standard IA after 30 days or you can move this object to S3 One Zone IA if the object is available to one Availability Zone only.

Other examples can be like,

Moving the object from one bucket type to another bucket type after some period
Move the objects to Amazon Glacier after a definite period
Expire the objects after a definite period

Amazon S3 supported following the waterfall model for migrating objects between different storage classes as shown below,

How To Enable Lifecycle Management In S3 Bucket Using AWS Portal

(Source: AWS document)

You cannot use a lifecycle policy to move the object from Glacier to Standard or S3 Standard-IA.

Lifecycle policy can be applied to the current version and the previous version of objects stored in the S3 bucket. Lifecycle policy can be used independently or in conjunction with versioning.

Let’s see the demo on how to enable the lifecycle policy,

Step 1

Step 2

Go to S3 storage service

Step 3

Open the S3 bucket. I have used the bucket ‘mys3kkbucket’ which I created in an earlier article

Step 4

Go to Management > Lifecycle

Step 5

Click on Add Lifecycle rule

Step 6

Enter a rule name of your choice. E.g. RuleTest

Step 7

In the Transitions section, there are two options,

Current Version – Include new objects
Previous Version – Include all objects which already exist in the bucket. Click Next.

Step 8

Let’s choose both the options and add transition rules,

Step 9

Click Next.

Step 10

In the Expiration section, configure the expiration policy for Current versions and Previous versions to remove the objects from storage class after a specified number of days.

Step 11

Click Next.

Step 12

In the Review section, you can review all the policies rules that you have configured in previous sections.

Step 12

Click Save and lifecycle policy will be created.

Summary

So, this is how we can configure the lifecycle policies for the transition of objects from one storage class to another storage class and remove objects after a definite period.