Simple Storage Services

Life Cycles in S3:

You can use lifecycle policies to define actions you want Amazon S3 to take during an object's lifetime (for example, transition objects to another storage class, archive them, or delete them after a specified period of time).

You can define a lifecycle policy for all objects or a subset of objects in the bucket by using a shared prefix (that is, objects that have names that begin with a common string).

A versioning-enabled bucket can have many versions of the same object, one current version, and zero or more noncurrent (previous) versions. Using a lifecycle policy, you can define actions specific to current and noncurrent object versions

Life cycle configuration:

·         If you upload periodic logs to a bucket, your application might need them for a week or a month. After that, you might want to delete them.

·         Some documents are frequently accessed for a limited period of time. After that, they are infrequently accessed. At some point, you might not need real-time access to them, but your organization or regulations might require you to archive them for a specific period. After that, you can delete them.

·         You might upload some types of data to Amazon S3 primarily for archival purposes. For example, you might archive digital media, financial and healthcare records, raw genomic sequence data, long-term database backups, and data that must be retained for regulatory compliance.

With lifecycle configuration rules, you can tell Amazon S3 to transition objects to less expensive storage classes, or archive or delete them.

Life Cycle Policies:

Implementing  Lifecycle policies within S3 is a great way of ensuring your data is managed safely (without experiencing unnecessary costs) and that your data is cleanly deleted once it is no longer required. Lifecycle policies allow you to automatically review objects within your S3Buckets and have them moved to Glacier or have the objects deleted from S3. You may want to do this for security, legislative compliance, internal policy compliance, or general housekeeping.

Implementing good lifecycle policies will help you increase your data security. Goodlifecycle policies can ensure that sensitive information is not retained for periods longer than necessary. These policies can easily archive data into AWSGlacier behind additional security features when needed. The glacier is often used as a ‘cold storage’ solution for information that needs to be retained but rarely accessed and offers a significantly cheaper storage service than S3.

Lifecycle policies are implemented at the Bucket level and you can have up to 1000policies per Bucket. Different policies can be set up within the same Bucketaffecting different objects through the use of object ‘prefixes’. The policies are checked and run automatically — no manual start required. I have an important note on this automation, be aware that lifecycle policies may not immediately run once you have set them up because the policy may need to propagate across the AWS S3 Service. Very important when starting to verify your automation is life.

The policies can be set up and implemented either via the AWS Console or S3API. Within this article, I will show you how to set up a lifecycle policy usingthe AWS console. Cloud Academy has a short “overview” blog post comparing Amazon S3.